So, if you’re not going to release a gem, just go ahead and fork (assuming the license allows it) and don’t worry about it. That’s 100% OK and even expected behavior at this point. Forks are actually one of the easiest ways to accept patches from contributors. The network graph is often a good way to evaluate both the health of a project as well as the potential areas for improvement.
If you intend to release a gem because the original has become unmaintained, you should either:
- Release it as
username-originalgemname - Contact the original author and offer to take it over. Then push new gems under the original name.
If you intend to release a gem because you need changes to the gem that would not benefit the community as a whole, you should either:
- Unpack the gem into a vendor directory and never release
- Release it as
username-originalgemname
In most cases, there is no problem with a gem release named username-originalgemname. This was the model that the GitHub gem repository took, so that’s how most people handle forks at this point.