Forking

Description

Anil Dash:

"There are several related technical concepts that can answer to the name "fork", but the one I reference here is the dramatic moment when a software project undergoes a schism on ideological or technical grounds. Instead of merely taking their ball and going home, those who forked were taking a copy of your ball and going to a new playground. And while splitting a community could obviously cause an open source community's momentum to grind to a halt, even the mere threat of a fork could cause significant problems, by revealing conflicting goals or desires or motivations within a previously-united community.

Still, forks have had important consequences. Firefox (earlier Firebird and Phoenix) was originally a fork of Mozilla, the open source browser that had been mired in indecision for half a decade. WordPress was born as a fork of B2, a neglected early blogging tool.

Outside of tech, forks have an even bigger meaning. You could make a pretty strong argument that the Reformation was a fork, or that Christianity itself is a fork. So clearly, forking a community can have a significant, even profound impact. But in tech, it had largely been seen solely as a violent, schismatic action.

Part of the predicate for forks being so disruptive was the idea that there is One True Version — a creation, like a piece of software, a written work, or anything else, that can only be accurately represented by a single ideal expression. Even some of the most disruptive technological innovations like Wikipedia are still built around the idea of achieving consensus on a definitive work, and striving mightily to avoid forks arising within the community.

Until a git named Linus changed that." (http://dashes.com/anil/2010/09/forking-is-a-feature.html)

More Information

• James Dixon: Forking Protocol: Why, When, and How to Fork an Open Source Project