I ran into a very good description of what a fork is in the latest issue of Enterprise Open Source Magazine. It was in the article Linux Technology Leadership and the Forking Issue by Kevin D. Morgan.


A fork is generally construed as:

  • A long-lived derivative of the master version of source code, and
  • A derivative that's not intended to "resynchronize" with the master source code, and
  • A derivative of some significance in the marketplace.
This is one of the most concise and well grounded descriptions of a fork that I have seen. It takes the concept of a fork away from a modification of the source code, and towards a work of significance in the marketplace.

The full article is available online.

Jacob