Fork Maintenance Limits Malleable Software Remixing

Geoffrey Litt posted that the essential difficulty of malleable software now boils down to fork maintenance. He noted the cost of creating custom tools or forking open source software is heading to zero, yet users often prefer to remix tools others have already built rather than start from scratch. The post links to an Ink & Switch essay titled Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps, which describes the shift from the original promise of personal computing as reshapeable clay to sealed appliances and envisions tools users can modify with minimal effort.