Don’t use Github. It’s been hijacked by Microsoft. I use codeberg, but there are many alternatives.
tf is a fork
In F/OSS circles pre-Github a fork was when there was enough dissatisfaction with a F/OSS project (for many reasons) that people went through the effort of taking the source of a project at a given point and making an entirely new project based on it. Some famous examples of this kind of fork would be the GCC/EGCS fork, the Xemacs/Emacs fork, the DragonflyBSD/FreeBSD fork, the X.org/XFree86/Freedesktop multiway fork, the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork, etc.
In this sense of the term “fork” it’s a major watershed event in F/OSS that sometimes shapes the way future projects run. (And sometimes, like the GCC/EGCS thing, one of the branches becomes the “new normal”.)
Post-Github, a fork is just what Github calls cloning a repository on their platform within their platform. Any time you look at a project on Github, if you have an account on Github you can “fork” it (in their sense of the term) which basically means you have a cloned snapshot of that project in your account. It’s functionally identical to typing “git clone <URL>” on your own machine only it’s all kept in Github’s own ecosystem.
What I find funny about the people protesting the second use as some kind of Github conspiracy is that the alternatives they themselves recommend instead … do exactly the same thing (but aren’t subject to the same conspiracy theorist tripe)! Cognitive dissonance is a HELL of a drug…
In today’s lesson the writer of the linked post learns that:
- words change meaning over time (consider what ‘hardware’ used to mean vs. what it means now, or ‘systems programming’, or even ‘computer’ for that matter!);
- the same word may be used in different ways in different contexts (e.g. “I put my plane in a bank to land by the river’s bank so I could deposit the money in the bank.”); and
- words are defined by their users and nobody else.
I’m excited to see what other lessons the writer learns in the future!
I think the point is that Github explicitly coopts the “fork” concept by advertising forks on the platform but failing to acknowledge that many forks live elsewhere.
