Fork

From Open Source Ecology
Jump to: navigation, search

A fork is a new version of a project that is started by a new team or by defecting team members. OSE encourages forks to occur as needed, because different stakeholders may have different needs than what the Main Trunk may offer. Before starting a fork, developers are encouraged to consider the Roadmap of a given project to determine whether the potential fork is not considered in future development phases of the main trunk.

See an example of Free Software forks of Linux (this shows mainly forks, but the distinction between forks and branches is not clear):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)