Flutter is a neat little UI toolkit allowing you to build applications targeting most major platforms. It started out mobile only, iOS and Android. Today it supports web and desktop too. I poked at it back in the day when I was considering some fun mobile app dev side projects. It made a pretty big splash initially, with a lot of community interest. Was it to be the fabled universal toolkit?

But over the years, I heard less and less about it and at some point got the impression that the project was defunct. How sad. So when Hazel Weakly boosted a blog post about a Flutter fork the other day, it piqued my interest. So much of the story sounded oddly familiar. It’s an “open source” project supported by a corporate entity that claims to be an OSS cheerleader but doesn’t actually show up. The symptoms are really easy to see. Things like:

  • An understaffed core dev team
  • Pull requests and issues that get ignored for years
  • Weird infrastructure that makes it hard for external contributors to participate
  • Lack of interest in community features
  • Needlessly contentious reviews and community friction
  • Devs who don’t actually use the product
  • Few or no commits to upstream projects

Oh, wait. Are we still talking about Flutter?

Anyways, it made me think that maybe it would benefit the Puppet community to have their own fork that could advance at the pace that we need it to. This is a model that’s worked out pretty well for Fedora and other upstream community forks. Not everything makes it back downstream, but most of the things that really matter do. And it achieves this goal without fragmenting the community. This sounds like what Flock wants to do with the Flutter community and I’m really excited for them.

I don’t know that I am ready to take on such a large project, but the idea is intriguing. It makes me wonder how many other people are having similar thoughts.

Since I’ve already got the public repos mirrored and syncing any updates, I might as well try to get them building packages too. This seems like a fun little baby step without actually committing to anything. I’m mostly just dipping my toes in the water and feeling things out. But if anyone is excited by the idea and wants to help out, just let me know.

And Happy Halloween for anyone celebrating. It’s my favorite holiday of the year.