Fork (software development): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:21, 2 September 2007

Revision as of 03:48, 4 October 2007

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*Most [[Linux distribution]]s are descended from other distributions, most being traceable back to [[Debian]], [[Red Hat Linux|Red Hat]] or [[Slackware]]. Since most of the content of a distribution is free software, ideas and software interchange freely as is useful to the individual distribution. Merges (''e.g.'', [[United Linux]] or [[Mandriva]]) are rare.

*[[Pretty Good Privacy]] was forked outside of the United States<!-- see that article for ref--> to free it from restrictive US laws on the [[export of cryptography|exportation of cryptographic software]].

*The game ''[[NetHack]]'' has spawned a number of variants using the original code, notably ''[[Slash'EM]]'', and was itself a fork of ''[[RogueHack (computervideo game)|RogueHack]]''.

*[[OpenBSD]] was a fork of [[NetBSD]] 1.0 by Theo de Raadt

*[[OpenSSH]] was a fork from [[Secure Shell|SSH]], which happened because the license for SSH 2.x was [[non-free]] (even though the source was available), so an older version of SSH 1.x, the last to have been licensed as [[free software]], was forked. Within months, virtually all Linux distributions, BSD versions and even some proprietary Unixes had replaced SSH with OpenSSH.