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by tremon
1556 days ago
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Just as I don't understand the original comment, I also don't understand yours The way Github e.a. use forks dilutes the larger meaning of the word, that's what this thread is about. When people used to talk about forks, they always mean a community fracture over differences of opinion: gcc vs egcs, xfree86 vs xorg, ffmpeg vs libav, openwrt vs lede, glibc vs eglibc, kde4 vs trinity, gnome3 vs cinnamon vs mate. The common-use term of "fork" on github has nothing to do with divergence of development, it's just a band-aid for lack of contributor access control. I can understand why people don't like github's use of forks, and that has nothing to do with what the license "allows" or not: if it's not a divergent development line, it's not a fork, it's a clone at best. In most cases, I'd say it's just a feature branch hosted in a different repository. Calling something a fork implies long-term viability (or at least the intention) as an alternative to the original repo. That doesn't sound like a realistic description of most cloned repo's on Github to me. |
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More accurately: it's a consequence of GitHub's early decision to reject the traditional currency of open source (patches) in favor of imposing dark pattern-infested workflows on hosted projects and their contributors.
When you accept patches, anyone can easily create an account, submit their patch, and then be on their way. GitHub's opting for an unnecessarily heavyweight pull request workflow instead, though, meant that contributors were required to set up a personal on-GitHub copy of the desired repo, point their copy on their local machine at that as a remote, and push to it. At that point, they're already paying the cost of project hosting overheads just for contributing to a project that isn't theirs. When it comes time to start their own project, or evaluate whether it's worth it to continue hosting their existing projects elsewhere, pressure to choose GitHub cones into play that wouldn't otherwise if there were a level playing field. Fast forward nearly 15 years of network effects, and you have it as a nearly unavoidable multi-billion dollar behemoth.
It's such a transparent growth hack inspired by the underhanded tactics used by social networks that folks' unwillingness to even acknowledge its negative impact on productivity and privacy is really infuriating—not to mention the negative impact itself.