Forking code isn't a bad thing. It isn't a good thing. It's just a thing.
The past couple of days you've probably heard the word "fork" more times than you can count. Facebook forked this (even though it didn't), Amazon forks that, the Chrome team forked the whole web, and so on and so on. While everyone is talking about who's forking who, nobody is bothering to explain exactly what forking is, and why so many people have an issue with it.
Forking, or shattering, got a bit of a bad rep back 20 years or so ago, as it tended to split up developers into separate factions who weren't sharing the code with each other. In the days of things like the Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs split, this was important because there weren't nearly as many people capable of working on these big, open-source projects, and having two branches or forks meant it takes longer to add features and address issues for both sides. In some cases this still happens, I'm sure, but for the most part there are plenty of developers who can fill the void left by those that have a separate vision and will fork off code to follow it. But some folks never forget, and the stigma attached to forking forkers gets passed down. Having said all this, we can't pretend bad forks don't happen. We just need to look past the act itself before we make our decisions.
I know a few of you out there know what all this means, and are just trying to ignore all the noise, but for many it's confusing. Let's try to fix that.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/4Wp1ZsZ5b7w/story01.htm
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