Forking open source projects

Hello,

First off, I’m sorry if this is the wrong sub for this kind of topic. I’ll gladly take this elsewhere if this is not the right place.

I’m fairly new to the world of open source projects, or at least new to the world of contributing to them. I never thought I’d be the kind of developer who would actually have something to contribute back to open source, since I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer.

However, in the quest to build myself a personal portfolio website, I came across an NPM module which would fit my needs pretty well. It was used by enough people to know that it worked. It has 1k+ stars on GitHub, and over 4k weekly downloads according to NPM .

The original author has done some great work, and they have some really neat and clever code I would not have thought of myself.

However, as I started using it, I realized that there were some limitations regarding what I could and couldn’t do with the child components which the library was creating. They are entirely encapsulated, so I don’t have direct access to them. However, if I was able to pass in a callback function, it could open up a whole new realm of possibilities.

So I forked the github repo, made my changes, wrote tests, tested it out manually, even created examples and added to the documentation, and then opened a PR against the original repo.

It’s been a few weeks, and the author has not replied at all yet. In fact, it seems that although they’re active on github, they haven’t touched this specific project at in the past 6 months. No replies to comments, no commits, no acknowledging issues, etc. There’s only one author that I know of. I was hoping the author would accept my PR, and the I could build even more on top of it and just use their package as a dependency. I even left them a comment saying that, but again, no response while they have been active on other projects.

That being said, because the repo has an MIT license, there is nothing keeping me from forking it, modifying it, and then making it available as an NPM package. Of course, I’d give the original creator the credit they rightfully deserve. However, how is this perceived in the open source community? Is this something that’s frowned upon, or perfectly acceptable? Is there some kind of common courtesy I should follow to notify the owner that I’ll be forking their repo and publishing my changes?

I just don’t want to step on any toes or offend anyone. On the other hand, there’s a lot I can do by having more control over the library, and I’m sure others can also benefit from my changes.