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Pussy imagezilla8/1/2023 The ability to fork is what's GOOD about every Free Software project. Forking is a drastic act you tend to do at the END of a conflict over patches/changes not being accepted that you can change the code if you don't like it is what gives users that last step of control one can make modifications or total conversions that much more easily. Normally most folks would rather push a change upstream or file a bug, those are a lot less effort and you improve the entire product. Forking is for experimentation in a direction no one wants to go, or because you're having a problem with something (say, you run on Java 1.5 and now Minecraft won't support that version soon. It's good for the codebase if it's Java 6 minimum, but it's bad for you. If you could fork, you could maintain a crusty Java 1.5 branch, which would at least still allow you to play. You might have to remove a few features, but you could do it. It's not a great reason, but it does happen. The biggest forks I've seen are Samba (Samba-ng was done with the approval of the Samba guys, and I think some of that code went into Samba 4), GCC (fork became the accepted official branch), OpenOffice/LibreOffice (everyone in the GNU/Linux world went LibreOffice while Apache & Oracle dicked around), Mambo/Joomla (no one uses Mambo these days, it's all Joomla all the time), and MySQL and it'sits millions of forks (Oracle dicking around again) It makes online communities for games tend to be a bit more fragmented, but what you find out is most people don't change the code, and cheaters aren't really stopped or helped by availability of source as it is, so it's more "last resort" than the theoretical "holy shit people are forking all the time" people often infer. The API is what is making minetest awesome, yes.
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