Stop Hate-Forking Projects You Love

Why Adam Innes believes forking is the highest form of flattery in the world of open-source software.

The open-source philosophy lets anyone take a project in a new direction by changing the original to create something unique. That philosophy is the reason we have projects like Firefox, a project originally forked from the Mozilla Application Suite. In Firefox’s case, the developers felt the software was too bloated, so they used the original codebase to create a more streamlined browsing experience. As a result, Firefox has become one of the most used browsers in the world. Forking a project is a sacred and important function of the open-source model, which is why it’s important to know when to do it right.