If I'm wrong? If they really can't get along with Eloraam? If they want' nothing to do with her? Branch the fuckin' code, compete, and let the market decide. Do it better and show us, goddamnit!
You know that this can't happen. There could only be one version of forge. Any other would be incompatible and cause more confusion than any good.
There's gonna be some incompatibility, sure. That's the entire reason for this hypothetical fork, to make a Forge-alike with other stuff too.
But if I fork off "Blast Furnace" that adds, say, hooks to support changing gravity's direction and intensity, there's nothing stopping me from tracking and merging vanilla Forge's bug-fixes and updates. There's a whole class of programmer utilities, called Source Code Control Systems, that are literally
made to solve the fork-merge problem.
And it can work the other way, too. If the Forge devs like pieces of Blast Furnace, they can merge that code in. (If the licensing permits. The license on everything that Blast Furnace copied from Forge will permit that, the license on the new code in Blast Furnace is up to the authors.)
Or the Forge devs can copy the interface but reimplement the internals. (The
Oracle vs. Google decision indicates that APIs aren't copyrightable.)
So the situation would probably end up as each modder saying "This mod works with Forge and with Blast Furnace," or "This mod requires Blast Furnace," or "This mod was written for Forge, support for Blast Furnace is untested."
And it'll be a bit confusing, but not terribly. Until the market decides which one is better, or the projects get merged again, or Blast Furnace literally becomes the new Forge, like the EGCS fork of GCC that was so successful that it became the official version.
Fakeedit:
Who's this you're on about?
eloraam vs immnibis on the rpic mod
Oh, now, that did piss me off. "Please stop making your addon mod that works with my mod, because I have a better solution coming Real Soon Now."
No, Eloraam, you should let the market decide.
At least she asked rather than making threats or changing her own mod's code to mess up the addon mod. (Cough flowerchild cough.)
Realedit:
Immibis made a power converter mod to convert BT to EU and back, Eloraam demanded that Alblaka remove it.
I thought she asked, not demanded. It's a bit fuzzy in my mind at this remove, but I'm pretty sure.
Actually, here. Google for
immibis eloraam remove blutricity site:industrial-craft.net. It's the top result.