A lot of projects like this can / should be forked. It depends on how much credit you want, if someone then looks at your fork and incorporates the change into mainline themselves.
If you don't have time to make a fork where do you find time to complain or file bug reports with the upstream? The only person you have to maintain a fork for is you; you don't even have to submit a fix upstream. You don't even have to put it on GitHub.
I've got code (with stars!) on GitHub. It's not all the code I'm willing to give away; it's all the code I'm willing to honor some vague level of public commitment for curation.
There are a lot of shitty places to work. I worked at a place that told me I couldn't take the time to submit a bug report upstream because of "OpSec"! Utter baloney.
I've worked places where the upstream was religion: there are no bugs in the upstream, you're using it wrong.
I've worked places where only packages which come with some distro or package manager are allowed. (And these places always use the public repos. They also habitually complain about Docker fees.)
I understand, but I do not sympathize. If I have to choose between fixing your workplace and fixing software I use, which is it going to be?
In that sense of the word, I already have made a fork. But I think it would be useful if my patch helped other people's version of the code be faster too. A forked version of the code that alters 3 characters in one place and is never maintained does not help with that even a little bit.
Given a choice of the version of the code that maintained, and the version of the code where one function is much faster, but is abandoned, how many do you think will go looking for the latter?
You're not a stranger here. I looked through your submissions for one about the specific issue at hand, didn't see anything about OpenNLP. Even if it doesn't stay on page 1 for days a Show HN is a submission, and people can look for it in your submissions.
Things like that. It's an example of not helping them find it. Maybe you don't even need the code, or all the code. Maybe it's a common enough issue that a blog post or Show HN with _just that_ would be enough. Heck, a Twitter thread: less is more!
Well I'm not going to submit it to HN. I have no reason to expect the developers of OpenNLP to read HN. Overall I'm not going to promote a fork I have no desire or intention of maintaining. That would just be misleading people.
