While the right to fork is fundamental to the free software philosophy, on a social level we emphasise that it should be a last resort (and that it's often worth putting up with a less than ideal upstream in the interests of compatibility). E.g. the FSF recommends using the perl license for perl packages, even though it recommends against that license in general. This is nothing new.
What Crockford's done is the equivalent of changing a few bytes in the PNG format and making his software use this "new" format. Making a completely new file format/license is fine, but you should only do it when your improvements are big enough to justify the incompatibility. A new one that's just a trivial tweak to an existing one, but incompatible, is bad.
What Crockford's done is the equivalent of changing a few bytes in the PNG format and making his software use this "new" format. Making a completely new file format/license is fine, but you should only do it when your improvements are big enough to justify the incompatibility. A new one that's just a trivial tweak to an existing one, but incompatible, is bad.