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Comment on Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People

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One of the things posted in this article is a comment on GitHub's popularization of the concept of "fork": to me this was a mistake made by those developers, and they should have used the actual term from git, "clone" (which, in fact, Google Code does in their implementation of this same concept).

The thing that makes git great is not that it is easier to /fork/ other people's work: we don't think of all the different versions of Linux out there maintained by different people in the hierarchy (Andrew Morton, Alan Cox, etc.) as "forks", and no one considers them "competing".

But now, GitHub is teaching this new breed of open source developer that there is no difference between using a distributed version control system to collaborate on a project and forking someone else's efforts to compete with them: that really does suck. :(

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