They have the same etymological root, from a Proto-Germanic word for a lump, which is the tooth (cog) on a cogwheel, or the round bulky lump of a cog ship.
You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.
I suppose the community around a product is also a reason to bring up an influential character's character. You can't fork the community, only fragment it. "I don't want to join a club with that guy in it" is a time when an ad hominem becomes a valid argument.
It is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If the community would adopt the style of not juding the person but only the product, that community would not care for that person. So the "I don't want to join a club with purpose X because of guy Y" leads to the problem that you are describing. If everybody would just "I join the club because of its purpose X achieved by means Z", that community split won't happen.
You can fork, but will you want to fork and spend time and effort, potentially in huge amounts, on that fork?
There are reasons to be wary. Choosing an alternative, where that particular reason for forking might not exist, is a valid choice to make.
In Classical Chinese actually. Mandarin, which I assume you mean, is not the language these characters were designed for. But it is related enough that the phonetic hints often (but not always) help.
Classical Chinese had a much larger phonemic inventory than modern Mandarin, and notably no tones. Below are a collection of Classical Chinese reconstructions in IPA that are all pronounced yì in Mandarin today. (like "ee" for English speakers). The creation of tones and other sound changes were fairly predictable, so as you say, the hints often still help today.
Nit point (I'm not sure it's relevant), but we don't know to what degree Old Chinese did or dit not have tones. The very first work to say anything at all about pronunciation is a Middle Chinese text from ~600AD, which already did have a system of 4 tones, albeit a different 4-tone system than Mandarin. Old Chinese pronunciation is a reconstruction from very limited data, not unlike proto-Indo-European, despite being considerably closer to the present.
I just looked it up and the phonetic markers are only like 20-30% reliable. I am shocked at this number as in my experience I would have thought it higher (I would have guessed 60-70%), but it is definitely hit-or-miss. I've never found tones to be predictable.
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