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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

No, but it's very likely that they'll make decisions that'll alienate the community and thereby cause it's ecosystem to lose more and more relevance. It has done that with other open source projects they stewarded.

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If they alienate the community, the community can fork it, right?

Only if there are major contributing developers who do not work for Google. Is that the case with Go?

If there are no major non-Google contributors to Go, then the fork may not be successful due to lack of familiarity with the code base.

It depends on what you mean by "the community". If it's a community of contributors, and Google pulls it into a direction the contributors don't want, then they can fork it and continue contributing to it. If it's a community of users, then they have no choice but to follow whatever the contributors decide. I agree you need to have major contributors on board with a fork.

There's more nuance to it though. Users eventually become contributors (at least some percentage are), they become and stay contributors when they feel heard and feel like they have the ability to influence development. That's what nurturing an open source community means. If you start alienating your non-core contributors they'll stop contributing, if you nurture and support your non-core contributors they might become core contributors. No body wants to work voluntarily on a project they can't influence - that's not a contributor, that's an employee.

In practice it's hard to fork out from the main contributers and keep the branch alive without resources on par with the main branch.

Then you rather do some new language.

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