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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.
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