Remember When "Fork" Was a Four-Letter Word?
It used to be that forking the code was interpreted as a failure in leadership. Forking would split the code, community, and users into competing factions and generally make life more confusing for everyone (see XEmacs).
In the world of distributed revision control systems like Git, forking means something different. These systems were designed to support a web of related revisions. Forking is just the way you roll. A multiplicity of forks is a sign of a healthy developer community. In fact, GitHub advertises the "5 Most Forked Projects" on their home page.
Jakub Narebski posted on 2008-07-03 (source):
There is a difference between "true fork" which is meant to direct project in new direction (usually followed by changing name of the project, Emacs -> XEmacs, Arch -> ArX, GCC -> EGCS, XFree86 -> X.Org) and "so called fork" (by GitHub), which is just copy (clone) of repository, usually meaning just separate branch of development. So "most forked projects" on GitHub are just projects with largest number of branches / clones / independent contributors. (It is a bit strange that GitHub follows very early single-branch-per-repository ~= fork/tree paradigm).Matthew posted on 2008-07-14 (source):
Thanks for emphasizing the distinction here, Jakub.