[reactordev]

Quite the contrary to their claim, we restrict forking on ALL our repos and still have meaningful PRs.

Your assertion is correct that most organizations operate this way.

However, open source is different. Often you’ll have someone fork - hack on it - devise a novel change - and request a PR from their fork:branch to origin:branch.

In this scenario, the fork - and subsequent hacking - are exploratory while submitting the change and PR is distinctive. Not sure how one is supposed to explore and hack and provide PRs in their model as you’re forced to branch. A local copy is still a “fork” but with a separate origin.

You can still do a dual origin setup or do a merge main onto yours but I find this extremely limiting to contributors and overly controlling by project owners. There’s nothing stopping you from enforcing squash on merge or having standards on your SDLC. Enforcing that on everybody else isn’t in our best interest though. A diarrhea of commits is how you end up with spaghetti code.