Home > Fork (software)

The term is particularly used in free or open source software, when a schism occurs because of different goals or personality clashes. Some see forks as a weakness in Open Source, but they can demonstrate the adaptability of the model. The relationship between the different teams can be cordial or very bitter.

In a fork situation, both parties inherit identical intellectual rights but typically only the larger group, or that containing the original architect, will retain the full original name and its associated social capital. Thus there is a reputation penalty associated with forking.

This can happen in closed-source software as well if the rights to the common code are shared, but this is rarer as usually there are strict rules about ownership of the code. More commonly in closed source software is a developer forking their own code to develop two versions, such as a windowed version and a command line version.

In some cases, a fork can merge back into the original project or replace it. EGCS (Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System) was a fork from GCC which proved more vital than the original project and was eventually "blessed" as the official GCC project.

Some projects attempt internal forks to further development. When the Mozilla suite (Seamonkey) appeared bogged down and overly beholden to Netscape's commercial needs, some Mozilla developers started a separate stripped-down browser project. This developed into Mozilla Firefox, which has been sufficiently successful to be declared the official Mozilla browser when it is ready.

1 Other examples

• Enciclopedia Libre is a fork from the Spanish-language Wikipedia to evade possible advertising.
• Pretty Good Privacy was forked outside of the United States to free it from the restrictive laws on the exportation of cryptographic software.
• XEmacsXEmacs is a text editor derived from GNU Emacs. It capitalises on good GUI support, mainly for the X Window System. XEmacs runs on almost any Unix-like operating system (inside X or on a text terminal), as well as on Microsoft Windows. It also runs on Mac was a fork from EmacsThis article is about the text editor. For the Apple Macintosh computer model, see eMac. Emacs is a text editor with a comprehensive set of features that is particularly popular with programmers and other technical computer users. The original Emacs was w to support the proprietary Energize environment.
• The split of BSDBerkeley Software Distribution BSD is the name of the UNIX derivative distributed in the 1970s from the University of California, Berkeley. The name is also used collectively for the modern descendants of these distributions. History AT&T Bell Laboratorie from AT&T UNIX.
• The many varieties of proprietarySomething proprietary is something exclusively owned by someone, often with connotations that it is exclusive and cannot be used by other parties without negotiations. It may specifically mean that something is covered by one or more patents, as in propri UNIX — all derived from AT&T UNIX and all called "UNIX", but increasingly mutually incompatible. See UNIX wars.
• The development of the NTFSNTFS or New Technology File System is the standard file system of Microsoft Windows NT and its descendants Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. NTFS replaced Microsoft's previous FAT filesystem, used in MS-DOS and early version of Windows. filesystem by Microsoft based upon previous work on HPFSHPFS or High Performance File System is a file system created specifically for the OS/2 operating system to improve upon the limitations of the FAT file system. It was written by Gordon Letwin and others at Microsoft and added to OS/2 version 1. 2, at tha that was left to IBM
• The game Nethack has spawned a number of variants using the original code (it is sometimes thought of as a fork of Rogue, but its code was written independently).
• OpenBSD was originally a fork from NetBSD, arising from conflicts of personality between NetBSD developers.
• OpenSSH was a fork from SSH, which happened because the license for SSH 2.x was " non-free" (even though the source was available), so an older version of SSH 1.x, which was the last to have been licensed as free software, was forked. Within months, virtually all Linux distributions, BSD versions and even some proprietary Unixes had replaced SSH with OpenSSH.
• The Xorg X server was a fork from XFree86 for a very similar reason as that of SSH and OpenSSH. Development on X11 has since speeded up and most distributions have switched.
• DragonflyBSD forked from FreeBSD in order to pursue different technical approaches to those used in FreeBSD 5.