Fork

Term

A fork is an independent copy of a software project, made from its source code in order to evolve it in a direction different from the original project.

In the open-source world, forking is common on platforms like GitHub or GitLab: a developer forks a repository to contribute back (via a pull request) or to start a derivative project. It is a fundamental mechanic of collaboration on public code.

Famous examples of forks that became projects in their own right:
- LibreOffice, fork of OpenOffice
- MariaDB, fork of MySQL
- io.js, fork of Node.js (since merged back)
- Ubuntu, fork of Debian

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Related terms

ORM

Bun

MySQL

A/B Testing

AI Act

API

Ready to find the missing piece of your team?