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In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but a split in the developer community, a form of schism.〔"Schism", with its connotations, is a common usage, ''e.g.'' ("the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism" ) (Jamie Zawinski, 2000), ("Behind the KOffice split" ) (Joe Brockmeier, ''Linux Weekly News'', 2010-12-14), ("Copyright assignment - once bitten, twice shy" ) (Richard Hillesley, ''H-Online'', 2010-08-06), ("Forking is a feature" ) (Anil Dash, 2010-09-10), ("The Great Software Schism" ) (Glyn Moody, ''Linux Journal'', 2006-09-28), ("To Fork Or Not To Fork: Lessons From Ubuntu and Debian" ) (Benjamin Mako Hill, 2005).〕 Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software (''e.g.'' Unix) also happen. == Etymology == The word fork stems from the Latin word furca, meaning a "fork or similarly shaped instrument."〔 See, e.g., ("furca" from Etymological Dictionary of Latin by Michiel de Vaan (Ph.D. 2002) )〕 "Fork" in the meaning of "to divide in branches, go separate ways" has been used as early as the 14th century.〔(Entry 'fork' in Online Etymology Dictionary )〕 In the software environment, the word evokes the fork system call, which causes a running process to split itself into two (almost) identical copies that (typically) diverge to perform different tasks.〔"The term fork is derived from the POSIX standard for operating systems: the system call used so that a process generates a copy of itself is called fork()." 〕 In the context of software development, "fork" was used in the sense of creating a revision control "branch" by Eric Allman as early as 1980, in the context of SCCS:〔Allman, Eric. ("An Introduction to the Source Code Control System." ) Project Ingres, University of California at Berkeley, 1980.〕 The term was in use on Usenet by 1983 for the process of creating a subgroup to move topics of discussion to.〔(Can somebody fork off a "net.philosophy"? ) (John Gilmore, net.misc, 18 January 1983)〕 "Fork" is not known to have been used in the sense of a community schism during the origins of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs) (1991) or the BSDs (1993–1994); Russ Nelson used the term "shattering" for this sort of fork in 1993, attributing it to John Gilmore.〔(Shattering — good or bad? ) (Russell Nelson, gnu.misc.discuss, 1 October 1993)〕 However, "fork" was in use in the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split,〔(Re: Hey Franz: 32K Windows SUCK!!!!! ) (Bill Dubuque, cu.cs.macl.info, 21 September 1995)〕 and was an understood usage in the GNU Project by 1996.〔(Lignux? ) (Marcus G. Daniels, gnu.misc.discuss, 7 June 1996)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fork (software development)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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