[wp-hackers] Access to update plugin & giving credit to original author

[Stas Sușcov]

On Sb 24 sep 2011 11:00:56 +0300, Tom Barrett wrote:
> Surely it is the nature of Open Source to fork projects? If you wish to give
> your code to the original plugin owner, you can always do that at a later
> date. But that seems like overly complicating matters.
>
> It's better to have an active plugin author than an absent one?
>


Unlikely. Forking a plugin, means a new slug, maybe a new name and a 
new history of releases/users.
If there's a chance to pick the code as a new maintainer, forking 
should never happen.

As another reason for that, take into account, that users will unlikely 
trust a new fork, and will keep installing the old version.

The best in this case would be to contact previous author, and ask him 
for commit access. If you want to simply mention someone
for credit in readme.txt, `Contributors` directive is all you need.