[moron4hire]

In the FOSS world, forking is traditionally considered a hostile action. GitHub normalized the name of the action "fork", but it's not the same thing. GitHub forks are part of the plumbing of their Pull Request metaphor and are not true forks. As long as you're submitting upstream and pulling down, you haven't "forked" the tree.

[gowld]

"fork is hostile" is a myth perpetuated by little Napoleons who want to to control how users use their software.

[fourthark]

It really depends on the situation. There are both friendly and hostile forks.