“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands…”

When considering the direction of a project, a series of concepts can come into play from the leadership of the organization to simply the development direction of a project. This raises an array of issues which could potentially divide a community to camps of any other subset of any size. While these issues all hold significance, the question of ground for a hard fork does not seem as significant as the action itself. That is, one could contest that a hard fork is something parallel to a declaration of independence, a move away, a step to one’s own.

While considering the reason for a fork may be a productive exercise, trajectories is a thought-provoking meditation on the significance of a hard fork. Offered by the GNU, there is a map of all Linux forks that have occurred since the beginning of the project, within the graph a collection of stories exist - link. It motivates a question: how productive is a fork actually? Robles and Gonz´alez-Barahona (2012) write on a collection of forks for the study of reason and outcomes to gauge the role of a fork in the long term viability of a project. They find the while forking does assist in the diversified development of a project, it rarely translates into a merge into master. Further shown in the tree provided by GNU, there exist very few branches which remerge into the master. This suggests that perhaps forks are not healthy, they disrupt communities and can splinter projects, but from that, they somehow persists, projects continue, projects get built and they last. So maybe the takeaway should not be that forking could be negative but instead a necessary evil for the greater good of the project - a necessary evolution.

Robles, Gregorio, and Jesús M. González-Barahona. “A Comprehensive Study of Software Forks: Dates, Reasons and Outcomes.” IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability, 2012, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33442-9_1.