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Comment by jimws | Hacker News Reader

Forking is not as trivial as you make it sound. You need to setup CI/CD with the new fork, then persuade the community to get on board the new fork. The bigger problem is to get the infrastructure and money to host a live CDN that serves the users.

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To clarify: it looks like CloudFlare is the actual CDN behind CDNJS. And getting on board the new fork would mean updates to every single reference to CDNJS URLs (in codebases), on top of the community of contributors moving. Yikes.

Seems to me like Cloudflare would be in a position where they could effectively decide on a new official fork and make sure it is one that is more sustainably maintained, then.

Cloudflare is already part of the jsDelivr network, if they're going to redirect then they should just redirect to that completely.

Seems there is a vital difference in their operating procedures though as jsDelivr is owned and operated by the for-profit company Prospect One and on their whims, compared to cdnjs which is community driven (even if the core community is really, really small).

And there's no mechanism on GitHub to point people to the new fork, from the project homepage. The best you can hope for is people notice there's no recent commit and open the issues page, to discover a possible issue about it.

Even then, it's not even clear how trustworthy any forks are. And the risk of the project fragmenting becomes high. Which is the "real" CDNJS if the original becomes stale and two credible actors both decide to fork it at the same time? In reality, there will end up being links to all three projects.

And I'm guessing that most consumers don't even go to the GitHub project, but rather through the website. And even there, they won't notice that they're not using the latest version.

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