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Comment by lexlash | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I’m one of the engineers on this. We’ve got some work we’re collaborating on - all of which is going upstream - and we wanted a shared place to stage it while we prepare PRs. I’ll be pushing a statement to our fork tomorrow.

(I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)

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Thank God. Otherwise this seemed like a very Microsoft/Java strategy.

I also worried having two different languages -- Google Swift and Apple Swift.

Maybe you should have tried to find out what this is about before posting it with a completely made up title?

It's not a "made up title", Google did in fact fork Swift on GitHub. That doesn't mean anything in an of itself, thousands of people/organizations have also done so, but it's mildly interesting since it's Google, and because it was posted here, we now know why.

Don't see a problem.

The problem is that "fork" means two different things at this point. Compare "FFmpeg developers fork FFmpeg" in the sense of "...and create libav" and in the sense of "...so they can submit pull requests." One is extremely newsworthy, one is extremely not. If you're posting something to HN, it's a reasonable assumption that readers will think you're posting a newsworthy thing as opposed to not.

How do you know the intention of a fork without their own explanation? It was unknown at the point of posting, and posting title is still technically valid.

This posting let you know their intention. Isn't it newsworthy?

"Google employees are contributing to another project" is not newsworthy, no. Neither is them creating a github fork unless you have evidence that they do not intend to use the fork for the main reason people create GitHub forks: contributing.

Made-up title? Github says "google/swift forked from apple/swift". Is that wrong?

Yes, just like putting 'President nukes turkey' would be silly thing to put in a newspaper if the president warmed up some turkey in a microwave.

I see your point. Thank you for your opinion, and I don't agree. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15701539 for why.

No, that doesn't make sense. You didn't think they merely made a github clone - as you yourself said above, you thought Google was going to make their own version of the language. You posted suggesting that they are. But it wasn't true. People working at Google had to correct you. Other users flagged your post into oblivion. Those thing wouldn't have happened if the title wasn't wildly inaccurate. You should have tried to find out if it was, instead of posting an inaccurate thing on HN.

Well, I'm gonna make some excuses and questions.

- I was worried about Google's intention, but I didn't claim one.

- I chose the word "fork" because it was what actually happen. I tried to be dry as much as possible to deliver just a fact. Making people confused was not my intention. Anyway, I'm sorry for that confusion.

- I didn't think the word "fork" is abusive or bad wording at the point of posting. I simply forgot the other meaning of "fork" at the point of posting. Now I remembered how it's different.

- Now I agree that the word "fork" could make you (and many other people) confused. I'm sorry.

- If the wording "fork" made you confused, I think you also need to blame Github for why they didn't use the word "clone" on their website.

- I blame Github because this is major reason of why I forgot the other meaning of "fork" nowadays.

- You are telling me to find out before posting this to here, but how? At the point of posting, there was literally no one was discussing on this. No one around me could explain Google's intention. I googled, and there was no result. If you know a good place to ask, please let me know. I'd love it.

- Google engineers came and explained their intention. IMO, this posting ended up in the best way it could.

or Webkit/Blink.

But good that they explained. Forking is a common strategy on Github, if one has no write access, to submit a pull request.

Or like a very Google/Java strategy

Why fork it then? Why just not use the existing process?

Because forking IS the process on GitHub. People and teams with no write access to the main repo can fork it and submit a pull request.

In my experience.

In general, corps only fork a repo when they want end users to use their repo.

In the case of development by corp's developers, they just generally fork it themselves and submit PRs from their accounts.

so I can see the confusion.

I do not think this is the process. You should raise proposal to swift community and if it gets accepted you start working on it.

Not other way around. You create fork and try to push and if they does not agree with you. You will say ok we are having our own fork.

From the heading I misunderstood google has forked the swift. I was little bit hurt, google always do same thing like they took WebKit and forked it and made it own version of browser instead of contributing back to webkit.

Facebook people also contribute to Swift but Facebook has no fork in their repository instead the person who contributes have in their own repo.

I have read somewhere steve jobs was very unhappy with this event and that is the reason they make their technologies close.

Swift is hard work of lot of people and Swift community, I really love the openness it brings in Apple. These types of incidents make them to rethink their decision and let developers like us to not involve in their choices.

Chris Lattner has done wonderful job to make community like this and if google misuse and made their own language out of hard work of swift community I do not think it is good for any of us.

I read google have not forked so I take my comment back as I cannot delete it.

Thanks HN

Ish thats the point of open source. Its not misusing a project to fork it and build something new off of it. WebKit itself was originally a fork.

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