Edited: August 7, 2022
Quilt is a mod-loader project – primarily aimed at Minecraft. It was founded by users and contributors from the Fabric project, as a last-resort attempt to address the controversies and issues stemming from that project. Because Fabric had a solid technological foundation with code that still did many things right, Quilt’s founders decided that the best option would be to take the standard open source approach to disagreements over management – they forked the Fabric project into a new mod-loader project, with the following ideas in mind:
Quilt has grown quickly since its inception, with relatively broad support from the wider community. While some corners of the community have attempted to push back against its modern progressive values, Quilt continues to grow, attracting developers and users from all walks of life.
Quilt takes an unusual approach to project governance, attempting to avoid giving any one person too much power over the project as a whole. This isn’t a particularly easy task, especially when it comes to managing community spaces (and platforms like Discord that don’t have the concept of group ownership). Quilt attempts to solve this problem by approaching it in a few specific ways:
With this approach, Quilt aims to avoid the problems that often occur when small groups of people have ultimate power over the entire project. Additionally, allowing teams to operate independently means that they end up working more efficiently and effectively.
Because transparency is a core part of Quilt’s values, it also makes use of a Request For Comments system, in the form of Pull Requests to a GitHub repository. This system exists to allow anyone to see, review and suggest changes to any of the project’s important processes, and even to suggest new ones via creating an issue or Pull Request. The process is itself detailed in RFC 0001: The RFC Process, and anyone may take part in it that wishes to.