Fork (software development)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A timeline chart of how Linux distributions forked.

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from
one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate
piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but a split in the
developer community, a form of schism.[1]
Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original
development team without prior permission without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks
of proprietary software (e.g. Unix) also happen.
We'll get right to it: Today we ask you to help Wikipedia. To protect our independence, we'll
never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about 50 lei. If everyone reading this right
now gave 10 lei, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. That's right, the price of a cup
of coffee is all we need. If Wikipedia is useful to you, please take one minute to keep it online
and ad-free.
Credit Card PayPal
Contents
[hide]

1 Etymology

2 Forking of free and open source software

3 Forking proprietary software

4 See also

5 References

6 External links

Etymology[edit]
The word fork stems from the Latin word furca, meaning a "fork or similarly shaped
instrument."[2] "Fork" in the meaning of "to divide in branches, go separate ways" has been used as
early as the 14th century.[3] In the software environment, the word evokes the fork system call, which
causes a running process to split itself into two (almost) identical copies that (typically) diverge to
perform different tasks.[4]
In the context of software development, "fork" was used in the sense of creating a revision control
"branch" by Eric Allman as early as 1980, in the context of SCCS:[5]
Creating a branch "forks off" a version of the program.

The term was in use on Usenet by 1983 for the process of creating a subgroup to move topics of
discussion to.[6]
"Fork" is not known to have been used in the sense of a community schism during the origins of
Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs) (1991) or the BSDs(19931994); Russ Nelson used the term
"shattering" for this sort of fork in 1993, attributing it to John Gilmore.[7] However, "fork" was in use in
the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split, [8] and was an understood usage in
the GNU Project by 1996.[9]

Forking of free and open source software[edit]

Free and open source software may be legally forked without prior approval of those currently
developing, managing, or distributing the software per both The Free Software Definition and The
Open Source Definition:[10]
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this, you can
give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a
precondition for this.
The Free Software Definition[11]
3. Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be
distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
The Open Source Definition[12]

In free software, forks often result from a schism over different goals or personality clashes. In a fork,
both parties assume nearly identical code bases, but typically only the larger group, or whoever
controls the Web site, will retain the full original name and the associated user community. Thus,
there is a reputation penalty associated with forking.[10] The relationship between the different teams
can be cordial or very bitter.
Eric S. Raymond, in his essay Homesteading the Noosphere,[13] stated that "The most important
characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting
the potential developer community". He notes in the Jargon File:
Forking is considered a Bad Thingnot merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but
because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between the successor
groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure
against forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs split, the fissioning of
the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that
they are remembered individually in hacker folklore.[14]
Eric S. Raymond, Jargon File

David A. Wheeler notes[10] four possible outcomes of a fork, with examples:

1. The death of the fork. This is by far the most common case. It is easy to declare a fork, but
considerable effort to continue independent development and support.

2. A re-merging of the fork (e.g., egcs becoming "blessed" as the new version of gcc.)
3. The death of the original (e.g. the X.Org Server succeeding and XFree86 dying.)
4. Successful branching, typically with differentiation (e.g., OpenBSD and NetBSD.)
Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork",
blurring the distinction with "branch".[15] With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git, the normal way to
contribute to a project is to first branch the repository, and later seek to have your changes
integrated with the main repository. Sites such as GitHub, Bitbucket and Launchpadprovide free
DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that the technical, social and
financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced, and GitHub uses "fork"
as its term for this method of contribution to a project.
Forks often restart version numbering from 0.1 or 1.0 even if the original software was at version 3.0,
4.0, or 5.0. An exception is when the forked software is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the
original project, e.g. MariaDB for MySQL[16] or LibreOffice for OpenOffice.org.

Forking proprietary software[edit]

In proprietary software, the copyright is usually held by the employing entity, not by the individual
software developers. Proprietary code is thus more commonly forked when the owner needs to
develop two or more versions, such as a windowed version and a command line version, or versions
for differing operating systems, such as a word processor for IBM PC compatible machines
and Macintosh computers. Generally, such internal forks will concentrate on having the same look,
feel, data format, and behavior between platforms so that a user familiar with one can also be
productive or share documents generated on the other. This is almost always an economic decision
to generate a greater market share and thus pay back the associated extra development costs
created by the fork.
A notable proprietary fork not of this kind is the many varieties of proprietary Unixalmost all derived
from AT&T Unix and all called "Unix", but increasingly mutually incompatible. [17] SeeUNIX wars.
The BSD licenses permit forks to become proprietary software, and some say[who?] that commercial
incentives thus make proprietisation almost inevitable. Examples include Mac OS X(based on the
proprietary Nextstep and the open source FreeBSD), Cedega and CrossOver (proprietary forks
of Wine, though CrossOver tracks Wine and contributes considerably), EnterpriseDB (a fork
of PostgreSQL, adding Oracle compatibility features[18]), Supported PostgreSQL with their proprietary
ESM storage system,[19] and Netezza's[20] proprietary highly scalable derivative of PostgreSQL. Some
of these vendors contribute back changes to the community project, while some keep their changes
as their own competitive advantages.

See also[edit]

List of software forks

Source port

Downstream (software development)

References[edit]
1.

Jump up^ "Schism", with its connotations, is a common usage, e.g."the Lemacs/FSFmacs
schism" (Jamie Zawinski, 2000),"Behind the KOffice split" (Joe Brockmeier, Linux Weekly News,
2010-12-14), "Copyright assignment - once bitten, twice shy" (Richard Hillesley, H-Online, 2010-0806),"Forking is a feature" (Anil Dash, 2010-09-10), "The Great Software Schism" (Glyn Moody, Linux
Journal, 2006-09-28),"To Fork Or Not To Fork: Lessons From Ubuntu and Debian" (Benjamin Mako
Hill, 2005).

2.

Jump up^ See, e.g., "furca" from Etymological Dictionary of Latin by Michiel de Vaan (Ph.D.
2002)

3.

Jump up^ Entry 'fork' in Online Etymology Dictionary

4.

Jump up^ "The term fork is derived from the POSIX standard for operating systems: the
system call used so that a process generates a copy of itself is called fork()." Robles, Gregorio;
Gonzlez-Barahona, Jess M. (2012). A Comprehensive Study of Software Forks: Dates, Reasons
and Outcomes(PDF). OSS 2012 The Eighth International Conference on Open Source Systems.
Retrieved 20 Oct 2012.

5.

Jump up^ Allman, Eric. "An Introduction to the Source Code Control System." Project Ingres,
University of California at Berkeley, 1980.

6.

Jump up^ Can somebody fork off a "net.philosophy"? (John Gilmore, net.misc, 18 January
1983)

7.
8.

9.

Jump up^ Shattering good or bad? (Russell Nelson, gnu.misc.discuss, 1 October 1993)
Jump up^ Re: Hey Franz: 32K Windows SUCK!!!!! (Bill Dubuque, cu.cs.macl.info, 21
September 1995)
Jump up^ Lignux? (Marcus G. Daniels, gnu.misc.discuss, 7 June 1996)

10.

^ Jump up to:a b c Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)?
Look at the Numbers!: Forking (David A. Wheeler)

11.

Jump up^ Stallman, Richard. "The Free Software Definition". Free Software Foundation.
Retrieved 2013-10-15.

12.

Jump up^ "The Open Source Definition". The Open Source Initiative. Retrieved 15
October 2013.

13.

Jump up^ Raymond, Eric S. (15 August 2002). "Promiscuous Theory, Puritan Practice".

14.

Jump up^ Forked (Jargon File), first added to v4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000)

15.

Jump up^ e.g. Willis, Nathan (15 January 2015). "An "open governance" fork of
Node.js". LWN.net. Retrieved15 January 2015. Forks are a natural part of the open development
modelso much so that GitHub famously plasters a "fork your own copy" button on almost every
page.See also Nyman, Linus (2015). "Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software" (Ph.D.).
Hanken School of Economics. p. 57. Where practitioners have previously had rather narrow

definitions of a fork, [...] the term now appears to be used much more broadly. Actions that would
traditionally have been called a branch, a new distribution, code fragmentation, a pseudo-fork, etc.
may all now be called forks by some developers. This appears to be in no insignificant part due to the
broad definition and use of the term fork by GitHub.
16.

Jump up^ Forked a project, where do my version numbers start?

17.

Jump up^ Fear of forking - An essay about forking in free softwareprojects, by Rick Moen

18.

Jump up^ EnterpriseDB

19.

Jump up^ Fujitsu Supported PostgreSQL

20.

Jump up^ Netezza

External links[edit]

Right to Fork at Meatball Wiki

[hide]

Free and open-source software

General

Alternative terms for free software

Comparison of open source and closed source
Comparison of open-source software hosting facilities
Formerly proprietary software
Free and open-source Android applications
Free and open-source software packages
Free software
Free software events
Free software movement
Free software project directories
Free software web applications
Gratis versus libre
Long-term support
Open-source software
Outline

SPDX

AROS
BSD
Contiki
Darwin
eCos
FreeDOS
Operating
system
families

GNU
Haiku
Inferno
Linux
Mach
MINIX
OpenSolaris
Plan 9
ReactOS

Development

Basic For Qt
Eclipse
Free Pascal
FreeBASIC
Gambas
GCC
Java
Julia
LLVM
Lua
NetBeans
Open64
OpenSSH
Perl
PHP
Python

ROSE
Ruby
Smalltalk
Tcl

BSD
GNU
Haiku
History

Linux
Mozilla
Application Suite
Firefox
Thunderbird

Organizations

Android Open Source Project

Apache Software Foundation
Blender Foundation
The Document Foundation
Eclipse Foundation
Free Software Foundation
Europe
India
Latin America
FreeBSD Foundation
freedesktop.org
FSMI
GNOME Foundation
GNU Project
Google Code
KDE e.V.
Linux Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation
Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Open Source Initiative

OpenBSD Foundation
Software Freedom Conservancy
SourceForge
Symbian Foundation
Ubuntu Foundation
VideoLAN Organization
Wikimedia Foundation
X.Org Foundation
Xiph.Org Foundation
XMPP Standards Foundation

Apache
APSL
Artistic
Beerware
Boost
BSD
CC0
CDDL
Licenses

EPL
GNU GPL
GNU LGPL
ISC
MIT
MPL
Ms-PL/RL
WTFPL
zlib

License types
and
standards

Comparison of free and open-source software licenses

Contributor License Agreement
Copyfree
Copyleft

Debian Free Software Guidelines

Definition of Free Cultural Works
Free license
The Free Software Definition
The Open Source Definition
Open-source license
Permissive free software licence
Public domain
Viral license

Binary blob
Digital rights management
Free and open-source graphics device driver
Comparison of open-source wireless drivers
Hardware restrictions
License proliferation
Challenges

Mozilla software rebranding

Proprietary software
SCOLinux controversies
Secure boot
Software patents
Software security
Trusted Computing

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Related
topics

Forking
Linux distribution
Microsoft Open Specification Promise
Revolution OS

Book

Category

Commons

Portal

Categories:

Software forks

Software project management

Navigation menu

Create account

Log in

Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history

Go

Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store
Interaction

Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page
Tools

What links here

Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page
Print/export

Create a book

Download as PDF
Printable version
Languages

Catal
etina
Deutsch
Espaol

Franais

Hrvatski
Italiano

Magyar
Nederlands

Polski
Portugus

Simple English
Slovenina
/ srpski
Suomi
Svenska

Edit links

This page was last modified on 3 June 2015, at 12:43.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using
this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.