Fox Fork Qr Code

[Bertoldo Beyer]

Insoftware 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.[example needed] The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community; as such, it is a form of schism.[1] Grounds for forking are varying user preferences and stagnated or discontinued development of the original software.

Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission, and without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software (e.g. Unix) also happen.

The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as the 14th century.[2] 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.[3]

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:[9]

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.

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.[9] The relationship between the different teams can be cordial or very bitter. On the other hand, a friendly fork or a soft fork is a fork that does not intend to compete, but wants to eventually merge with the original.

Eric S. Raymond, in his essay Homesteading the Noosphere,[12] 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:[13]

Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch".[14] With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git, the normal way to contribute to a project, is to first create a personal branch of the repository, independent of the main repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with it. Sites such as GitHub, Bitbucket and Launchpad provide 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[15] or LibreOffice for OpenOffice.org.

The BSD licenses permit forks to become proprietary software, and copyleft proponents say that commercial incentives thus make proprietisation almost inevitable. (Copyleft licenses can, however, be circumvented via dual-licensing with a proprietary grant in the form of a Contributor License Agreement.) Examples include macOS (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[16]), Supported PostgreSQL with their proprietary ESM storage system,[17] and Netezza's[18] 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.

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.

Open source software is based on the idea that by sharing code, we can make better, more reliable software. For more information, see the "About the Open Source Initiative" on the Open Source Initiative.

When creating your public repository from a fork of someone's project, make sure to include a license file that determines how you want your project to be shared with others. For more information, see "Choose an open source license" at choosealicense.com.

For more information on open source, specifically how to create and grow an open source project, we've created Open Source Guides that will help you foster a healthy open source community by recommending best practices for creating and maintaining repositories for your open source project. You can also take a free GitHub Skills course on maintaining open source communities.

You might fork a project to propose changes to the upstream repository. In this case, it's good practice to regularly sync your fork with the upstream repository. To do this, you'll need to use Git on the command line. You can practice setting the upstream repository using the same octocat/Spoon-Knife repository you just forked.

Note: If you want to copy additional branches from the upstream repository, you can do so from the Branches page. For more information, see "Creating and deleting branches within your repository."

You can also create a new repository where you can put all your projects and share the code on GitHub. Creating a repository for your project allows you to store code in GitHub. This provides a backup of your work that you can choose to share with other developers. For more information, see "Quickstart for repositories."

Each repository on GitHub is owned by a person or an organization. You can interact with the people, repositories, and organizations by connecting and following them on GitHub. For more information, see "Finding inspiration on GitHub."

It is always ethically acceptable to fork any code on Github (or Sourceforge or wherever you got it from) and do whatever you want with it, within the terms allowed by its license! This is what open source and permissive licenses are all about. The original author wanted the world to contribute to this piece of software, and you will be doing exactly that.

If you do feel that you did some good improvements, send pull requests back to your upstream, as usual. If the original author never comes back, then so be it. If he does, he can integrate them (or not if he so chooses). But this is strictly optional, you are neither legally nor ethically forced to do so.

About uploading it to some other locations (Ansible Galaxy or whatever - say Docker Hub for docker images and so on): the issue is probably mostly to avoid irritations due to the name being "replaced" (but I'd assume if the original author already has uploaded it to A.G., you can't just replace it, anyway). So, in the latter case, just upload it with another name, which is still easily identifyable as related to the original - say, append some suffix which is not too obnoxious.

If the author, in your case, should later re-appear, and you had uploaded the software to the Ansible Galaxy, and he wants to take over, then you two will simply communicate and resolve the issue somehow (i.e., merge the two forks again and decide who keeps updating Ansible Galaxy). Chances are that he will be more than glad to leave the work to you.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

As others have pointed out, this should be ethically OK.However, I would find it polite (and ethically correct) to add a note to a prominent place in your readme file stating that this is a forked repository and provide a link to the original.

The Fork system call is used for creating a new process in Linux, and Unix systems, which is called the child process, which runs concurrently with the process that makes the fork() call (parent process). After a new child process is created, both processes will execute the next instruction following the fork() system call.

So there is a total of eight processes (new child processes and one original process). If we want to represent the relationship between the processes as a tree hierarchy it would be the following: The main process: P0 Processes created by the 1st fork: P1 Processes created by the 2nd fork: P2, P3 Processes created by the 3rd fork: P4, P5, P6, P7

Parent process and child process are running the same program, but it does not mean they are identical. OS allocates different data and states for these two processes, and the control flow of these processes can be different. See the next example:

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