That reminds me that "fork" when used as a verb on GitHub's UI should more accurately be "cloud clone".
GitHub's terminology has muddied the waters between the concept of actual forks (longterm divergent development) and a particular implementation of a permission system for branches.
We used to just call it a 'branch' because it was just another branch in the distributed revision tree. There is nothing special about a branch you create and commit to, whether it's by clicking on a picture on the screen or typing a command in a terminal.
Calling a branch a fork is just a water-muddying term probably coined by some suit in marketing who saw the buzzword somewhere in an article on the Internet Explorer and thought they would re-purposed to use as a product differentiator.
That's a second-order observation. We could use any noun for that if and when it's relevant - I suggest alternadoodley.
Like I said, "fork" already has a useful meaning with regard to an OSS project, so there's no need to overload it. Is the following sentence not confusing? When you fork on GitHub you create a fork but not every fork is a fork.
Put it this way, when the user presses the Fork button in the GitHub UI, is their intention to contribute to the project, or is it to create a competitor/alternative to the project.
I say the former situation is an obfuscated permission system and the latter is a fork.
[ I've gone rather off-topic from TFA so will stop commenting now! ]
That reminds me that "fork" when used as a verb on GitHub's UI should more accurately be "cloud clone".
GitHub's terminology has muddied the waters between the concept of actual forks (longterm divergent development) and a particular implementation of a permission system for branches.