[lamontcg]

Also:

> In August 2025, and seemingly out of nowhere, someone pointed me to the project spinel-coop/rv-ruby, an apparent fork of homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby. I say "apparent", because rather than using GitHub's fork button—which would have maintained clear attribution of who created the upstream project—it looks like it was instead cloned and re-pushed by Andre.

GitHub has long had problems with forked repos being half broken compared to the original repo. Used to be that you couldn't search within forked repos, at the very least.

I'd actually consider it best practice to push to a new repo if you were entirely taking over a project and weren't going to be pushing upstream.

I haven't extensively researched if GH has managed to eliminate all the reduced features of forks, but after something like 15 years of using it (proabably about the same amount of time Andre has), I would reflexively establish a fresh main repo if I was setting up a project and I wouldn't fork.

This isn't really evidence of anything other than the author of the blog post looking to spin a narrative.

[cyphar]

The idea that not using the "fork" button on GitHub is somehow obscuring authorship is unhinged -- the actual license only requires you keep license headers intact (if your license headers don't convey authorship properly, you should fix that -- as an aside, this is why I don't like the "Copyright X project and contributors" thing). AFAICS, the fork even has the full commit history of the original project (which isn't even a GPL requirement) so I fail to see how anyone could reasonably see this as obscuring ownership.

As someone who has dealt with people maliciously stripping out copyright headers before, this example just smells of someone running out of examples while trying to construct a list of petty grievances. Yes, the README of the fork was updated to stop referencing the original project, what would you expect from a fork? Would it have been nice to add a note that it was forked from another project? Yes (and he did exactly that a month later), but it's really not required and I disagree not doing so it somehow hypocritical.

And yes, GitHub forks still have a lot of limitations. I wouldn't use them when creating new projects either.