Re: What counts as a fork?

[Paige DePol <lual@...>]

steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Paige DePol <lual@serfnet.org> wrote:
>> I would have to agree, I don't count successors to a previous version of
>> software as being a fork.
> 
> Now, I remember this word 'fork' before Github, and it was considered
> the Nuclear Option. E.g. when GCC forked just before the millenium,
> and the old fork lost. People got seriously upset about this kind of
> thing.
> 
> Github re-used and re-purposed the word, rather like how Facebook
> changed the operational meaning of 'friend'.  Nowadays, having lots of
> 'forks' of your Github project is a measure of success!
> 
> Just as the old meaning of 'friend' remains important, we should
> remember the history of the term. Personally, I don't think it a Bad
> thing, sometimes people need to try out new things. As long as credit
> to the original codebase is always given, both in the spirit and the
> letter of the license.

Indeed, forking has existed long before GitHub, they just made the term more
popular with a very nice online repository system. I think I understand what
you mean by repurposed though, GitHub requires you to create a fork of a
project to create changes on it, then the original project can do a pull
request to bring in your changes if they desire. However, that actually is
still adhering to the definition of "fork"; a copy of a project is still
being made by someone not the original developer for independent development.

The *politics* of creating forks, however, is another whole issue, and I do
agree with some of what is said about that. Sometimes though forks need to
be created, either because upstream doesn't accept patches (like Lua), or
because of ideological differences, or just for educational purposes even
if the fork will never be released.

I do understand that words change meaning over time, that is one of the fun
things about a living language. My only point in all of this was that any
version of Lua created by anyone who isn't one of the original developers
is, by every definition I can find, creating a fork of Lua.

~Paige