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Comment by mrgoldenbrown | Hacker News Reader

There are two distinct meanings of fork and you are conflating them I think. I suspect winamp's license is using the sense of the (pre GitHub) idea of creating a distinct version of a project maintained by a different group, and the GitHub ToS specifically refers to forking within the GitHub platform.

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Let's say you are hallucinating "two distinct meanings of fork". Unless you are referring to tableware, a fork is a fork, it's any distribution of a software, based on the software in question. The fact that most forks on GitHub serve only operational purpose, nobody actively maintains them and nobody normally uses them instead of the parent project, doesn't change what they are: a distributions for (potentially, and unless PR is accepted, actually) distinct software projects, based on a project they are forked from. You are just so used to the button and the process, you lost track of what the label on that button actually means, why it's called "a fork". And the answer is, well, because it's a fork. In no way it is different from starting a MariaDB project. As soon as you press that button, you are distributing your own software, based on that parent software. If the parent project disappears, or moves on, or never accepts your PR, which somebody really likes, other people can (and probably will) use your fork in a way that isn't any different than, well, any larger and "more obvious" fork.

So, essentially, winamp license means nothing. They already forfeited their right to deny you forking by posting it on GitHub.

Just an aside, but really hope "maybe you're hallucinating..." doesn't catch on in human to human speech.. Its great for the models, kinda too flattening for real discourse.

“…maybe you’re hallucinating…” and “…I must be hallucinating…” Have been part of human to human communication since the 60s, when people in fact could very seriously have been. It continued on for acid flashbacks and other surreal moments

Thats certainly true, and at least in philosophy similar discourses go back much farther than that!

But the senses are importantly different right? In the former, we are talking about clearly psychological assertions, in the form of skepticism, within an otherwise shared world.

Here it is clearly rhetorical though, right? Talking to GP as if they were LLM. Using it for a not-so-shorthand for "I believe you to be wrong about this".

Its really not a big deal. It's just interesting, I guess, how much the tools tend to master us and change us while we lie to ourselves that its the other way around.

Also, hadn't heard "acid flashbacks" in a long time.. Still waiting for mine!

I've used LSD a few times, but to my knowledge never had any "acid flashbacks". Maybe that's for the best... but seems like it might be fun if one was in a safe environment.

"Maybe you're hallucinating", let alone "let's say you're hallucinating", is a really weird take on someone thinking of a reasonable semantic distinction even if you disagree about its existence or relevance.

Perhaps you can say that to a friend as banter or in a tongue-in-cheek way, similarly to how you might say "I must be hallucinating" about yourself. But as an argument in a discussion with a stranger, it seems rather dismissive and inappropriate.

And it does reek a bit like something stolen from LLM terminology.

Any public GitHub fork is being distributed.

You can't have a private Github fork

Yes you can; it's set at the organization level

https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-organizati...

You can, but only private forks of a private repo are allowed. Private forks of public repos are not allowed by design (modulo some weird bugs that were discussed on a past post).

I stand corrected

Is forking a well defined term? Doubt it will hold up in court.

They don't give permission, so the lack of definition doesn't really matter.

If they were trying to grant a narrow permission and then enjoin someone they thought was outside of their definition, it would matter (But they just aren't giving permission to distribute modified versions).

Anything the owners of the Winamp code can find in order to take legal action on will be distributed. Rule 2 (and 3) is always superfluous in practice.

A fork is a copy of a repo at a certain version. A copy of the files of the repo without the .git folder is effectively a fork. Either way, their terms contradict what GitHub allows.

What is the other meaning of fork?

When you click "fork this repo" in GitHub, that clones the repository, and re-publishes it under your username.

When you clone a repo to your system privately, that does not involve publishing. If this is their intended meaning of "fork", then this license must explicitly disallow cloning the repo!

> What is the other meaning of fork?

The older, still in use today meaning is what happened when Oracle bought MySQL and ruined it. People forked it and now we have MariaDB. Basically, it means a fork in the code base and now there are two separate projects.

Yes.

Until Github came along, "Creating a copy of software for your own personal use" had never been widely-accepted definition of the word "fork" in the context of software development. Forking a project has always involved independent publication and maintenance of said project.

The typical way of copying a project for your own personal use on GitHub involves publishing that copy on GitHub. So, it is a real fork—maybe not a well maintained one, or one that the author is particularly excited about, though!

OK, but that's still not different.

When you fork a project on GitHub, that literally creates a parallel working history, and publishes it under your username. That's what GitHub means by "fork".

So what's the other definition?

Many years ago I would have called that "mirroring", which is definitely not forking.

OK, but a mirror only exists to share an exact (hopefully up-to-date) copy of the repo. So we are just moving the goalpost from the moment you create the fork to the moment you edit it. Did that really change anything? I don't think so.

You can Zeno's-paradox-away the distinction between a bathtub and a kitchen sink, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

This sort of argument change how people understand words, and it also doesn't change how lawyers interpret laws nearly as often as people think. It's still fun, though!

> Oracle bought MySQL and ruined it

By "ruined" you must mean "solved decades-long issues and turned it into a real database", or we're talking about two different projects.

https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-...

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-nutshell.html

Do note that the largest users (like GitHub and Facebook) still use the original MySQL, and AFAIK have no plans to abandon it.

In particular I think you may press the fork button on the github repo as per github rules. However, you are not allowed to make any commits to this new repo.

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