foreground
= F =
fork bomb
fork
In the open-source community, a fork is what occurs
when two (or more) versions of a software package's source code are
being developed in parallel which once shared a common code base,
and these multiple versions of the source code have
irreconcilable differences between them. This should not be
confused with a development branch, which may later be folded back
into the original source code base. Nor should it be confused
with what happens when a new distribution of Linux or some other
distribution is created, because that largely assembles pieces than
can and will be used in other distributions without conflict.
Forking is uncommon; in fact, it is so uncommon that individual
instances loom large in hacker folklore. Notable in this class
were the http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html, the GCC/EGCS
fork (later healed by a merger) and the forks among the FreeBSD,
NetBSD, and OpenBSD operating systems.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.