Backdrop, forking Drupal, and the next few weeks

There I was, earlier this week, talking about how you change can bring discomfort, and sometimes you have to ride that discomfort... and a number of high-ranking core Drupal developers go and fork core, in the Backdrop project. Me and my big mouth.

I've spent the past day or two trying to digest how I feel about this, and I'm still not sure. Mostly trepidatious, I suppose. Without looking more closely at the technical ins and outs, of course my first opinions will be formed by loyalties: to Drupal, to the developers I know personally, to the ways in which I code. But hopefully I'll be able to make a more well-informed, even pragmatic decision, by the time I really have to. Right now for me - as for most of the Drupal-site developers, as opposed to Drupal-core developers - it's not likely to make much of a difference to my day-to-day work, whatever it might do to my confidence in the long term.

Technical questions aside, then: I think what's most important in the next few weeks is that, whatever people's opinions on the subject, and however strongly they might be held, we should be kind to each other.

People will be jangly and on edge, on both sides of the fork (and in the middle too); offence will be far more easily taken than before; while you're obviously still at liberty to make this or that "hilarious" joke, you should ask yourself whether or not it's the right thing to do, based on how it might be interpreted. We say "stay for the community" because we pride ourselves on the way we accept newcomers, form professional ties, and accommodate alternative points of view.

Drupal has been forked, but - at least in the short term - its community need not fork as well. And if it ever has to in the future, then surely it would be the least bad scenario, were it to do so with mutual respect still held on all sides.