Maybe nobody says that exact thing, but people do often say things like “if you ...

worthless-trash · on Nov 14, 2022

I had never thought that the "you can always fork it" as a way of shutting down discussion.

I maintain forks that are frequently rebased on main/master with a few users. I have even suggested this as an action to people who wanted different features that I was not capable of maintaining.

zen21 · on Nov 14, 2022

For sure. And presumably those projects are ones in which maintaining a fork is practical. I have both forked and suggested forking.

However for many projects ‘just fork it’ is not a good faith suggestion, so it can’t be a blanket answer that applies to all FOSS.