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forked: adj.,vi. 1. [common after 1997, esp. in the Linux community] An open-source
software project is said to have forked or be forked when the project group
fissions into two or more parts pursuing separate lines of development (or,
less commonly, when a third party unconnected to the project group begins
its own line of development). Forking is considered a
Bad Thing — not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort
in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of
strife and acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy,
succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against
forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs split, the
fissionings of the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the
short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that they are remembered
individually in hacker folklore. 2. [Unix; uncommon; prob.: influenced by a mainstream expletive]
Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system was slowed to a
snail's pace by an inadvertent fork bomb.
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