I also encourage everyone who doesn't like the ways of pcb-rnd but does like the code, to fork the project: copy the repository or the code, rename it, make whatever modification and publish it.
There is only one use pattern I find harmful: when someone makes a fork, clone or mirror without clearly marking it being a copy. Unfortunately this has happened on github and gitlab: an user cloned a very old version of pcb-rnd and called it simply pcb-rnd. This matters because popular web search engines assign high scores to projects hosted on github. A potential user who hears about pcb-rnd not from us (the dev team), will not know the URL of the project and will use a web search, which then promotes github from where he will pull and old version. He may later read the doc and figure it's just a random copy of an old version, and go and get the latest from the official site, but the point is:
But the real lesson learned for me was not this, but how github is not motivated in avoiding such confusion.
The first meta text on the github page says:
"Contribute to pcb-rnd development by creating an account on GitHub."This is clearly a lie - that's not how you contribute - instead, contribution is via svn commits and IRC. Unfortunately google picks up the same setence so this false information is on the first page of a google search on "pcb-rnd".
I first tried to contact the author to ask him to rename his fork; github is not helping much in that: there's no contact info for the user, not even a captcha-protected email or "send a message" form. I'd expect such a service was designed to help people work together, which does include contacting others.
So I went on and found the problematic user's email from other sources. I tried to contact him a few times but he ignored my attempts.
After seeing an actual user getting confused on the said github project, I decided to contact github and see if they are willing to help in renaming the repository to avoid confusion. Well, they are not. I got an answer from the support that made it clear they did not even read the request, just copied some stock answer. After getting through that layer,they said I should file a DMCA take-down request; I asked them whether they think it would apply in case of GPL projects but they said they can't answer that and I should consult a lawyer! But after reading their own material on DMCA it's pretty clear they would simply do nothing even if the said user actually committed copyright infringement.
So my conclusion is: if you ever want to get a project hosted, do NOT choose github, because:
(All the above is obviously my personal opinion based on my personal experience.)