The glad for open source and love that someone can fork something if they want to or feel they need to, but I have a hard time understanding bits like this:
>While some have couched their concerns within long notes about their affection for the project, others, like “felix,” kept it short: “ ‘acceptable ads’ is an oxymoron ... i accept no ads. you fail; goodbye.” There has been a movement proposing to “fork” the project — that is, run a version of Adblock Plus before the changes, as is allowed for open-source projects.
It sounds like the defaults are being changed and it's easy to switch back to "block all". Seems like the "fork" would be a boolean value in a default config file.
Palant said explicitly in a blog post that he turned the whitelist on by default because the vast majority of people don't change the default.
The forum has also been inundated by complaints (I've been following this) from people who installed ABP for 4, 5, 6 of their non-tech savvy friends who don't know what's going on, why ABP stopped working, and how to change it back. Thus, Palant has unwittingly caused (perhaps) hundreds of thousands of people to be inundated with tech support requests from their friends. That's part of the backlash.
I get that, I think here though, the idea is that those defaults are probably fine for the average user that can't be bothered to check the config. (On a tangential note, as that link talks about reinstallation and rote reconfiguration, this would be an example of where unix-style/philosophy is so nice. Configure it once, back up your config files in version control and you're good to go even if you reinstall.)
>While some have couched their concerns within long notes about their affection for the project, others, like “felix,” kept it short: “ ‘acceptable ads’ is an oxymoron ... i accept no ads. you fail; goodbye.” There has been a movement proposing to “fork” the project — that is, run a version of Adblock Plus before the changes, as is allowed for open-source projects.
It sounds like the defaults are being changed and it's easy to switch back to "block all". Seems like the "fork" would be a boolean value in a default config file.