 As someone that talks a lot about free and open source software on my channel, one of the things that I often talk about are these software forks, these forked projects, right? They take an existing free and open source project and then they fork it and then they take that code base from that point on and then they go in their own different direction because they have some different visions than what the original project had. And the software forks, they're actually healthy. They're beneficial to the community. They're a positive force. But a lot of people I've noticed in the free and open source community actually have a negative reaction to forking, right? They see all of these forks as unnecessary, as unhealthy as a drag to the free and open source community. Like we have too many people working on the same thing essentially. Too many forks is a bad thing. And I actually completely disagree with this because there are many examples of really fantastic free and open source software that originated as a fork of another project. And also there are many pieces of free and open source software that are better today because other people forked it and then forced the original project to become better. A great example of this would be the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME back in 2010, 2009, 2010, about 12 years ago. GNOME 2 reached end of life as GNOME was moving to version 3. GNOME 3 or the GNOME shell and the free and open source community, the Linux community, pretty much hated GNOME 3 because it was a radical UI change that nobody really understood at the time. It didn't operate. It didn't look and feel anything like GNOME 2. It was such a drastic change that everybody that loved GNOME 2 were really put off that GNOME 3 was something totally different, broke everyone's workflow. On top of that GNOME 3 in the early days was very crashy, very buggy, was very heavy and bloated especially for that time period 2010. Most computers were very underpowered and pretty much the community just didn't like it. So you had all of these forks that sprung up almost immediately as GNOME went from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. All of a sudden you had Ubuntu creating Unity. You had the Mint team creating Mate and Cinnamon and then you later had Budgie and now you've got System76 creating their Cosmic desktop. Now not all of these are technically forks. Mate is definitely a fork as a fork of the old GNOME 2. Cinnamon started life as really extensions on top of the GNOME shell and Unity really isn't a fork of GNOME at all, but it was trying to be very GNOME shell like or at least it was back in the day. And all of these desktop environments they exist because they wanted to create a GTK based desktop that was something different than GNOME 3 and something better than GNOME 3. And in a lot of ways GNOME 3 was so bad for many, many years. It really forced the GNOME developers to start implementing some different changes. They started having to listen to the community as more and more the community was using these other GTK based desktops. GNOME 3 eventually started implementing some of this stuff in the later versions of GNOME 3 and now the GNOME 4D series, GNOME is a much better desktop environment than what it was. GNOME 3, the early versions were absolutely horrible, almost unusable. GNOME 4D may be the best desktop environment we've ever had on Linux. And why? It's because of the forks. And in some ways I could say the same thing about KDE. The reason it's better is because of all of these desktop environments that exploded on the scene because many people don't realize, you know, 15 years ago you really only had like half a dozen desktop environments to choose from as far as full desktop environments and really you only had two big ones. Everybody either ran GNOME or KDE, right? And now of course we have, there's 20 different desktop environments, good desktop environments that I could choose on Linux, not to mention 100 stand-alone window managers to choose from as well. So I do think that KDE is better because of all of those GNOME forks. I think all of those competing desktop environments help push KDE forward. Not to mention KDE does have some forks of its own. We have the Trinity desktop environment, which is a fork of an older version of KDE, 3.5. We also have competing cute desktop environments such as LXCute, which is a continuation of a now dead project. Originally it was RazorCute and if all of these competing projects hadn't of sprung up, then GNOME and KDE really wouldn't have any competition and we might have been stuck with some of what we had in those early versions of GNOME 3 or in those early versions of KDE 4, which is also was slow, buggy, crash-tastic, nobody really liked KDE 4 as well. And now both GNOME and KDE Plasma are just amazing desktop environments. They're pretty much universally loved among the community, which was not the case 12 years ago. And I can even make an argument that some of the stand-alone window managers out there, many of these tiling window managers that are forks of each other, that they help push the original project forward. The competition is healthy and a great example is DWM, which is one of the older tiling window managers around and one of the very early forks of DWM is the awesome window manager and the awesome window manager basically took DWM, which really had no features because DWM is a suckless project. It's so minimal and also window manager put all of this extra functionality into DWM and their fork called the awesome window manager. And although a lot of that stuff hasn't made its way into the base code of DWM, there are a lot of DWM patches that really I think exist because all these other tiling window managers have these these functionalities, right? That DWM lacks of people are creating patches for DWM. The community is creating patches for it, mainly because the forks exist. Now, sometimes forking a project is necessary to keep it going, to keep it alive because the original project is going to die because the maintainers no longer want to support it or a company is behind it. Maybe that company goes bankrupt or it's taken over by another company. A perfect example of this is in 2009, Sun Microsystems was taken over by Oracle and Sun Microsystems was maintaining things like LibreOffice and MySQL, MySQL. And the community did not want these freed open source projects in the hand of Oracle. Oracle was not a friend to freed open source software. So the community expected Oracle to come in and pretty much destroy OpenOffice and MySQL. So what did the community do as soon as the news was out that Oracle had taken over Sun Microsystems, we forked OpenOffice and created LibreOffice. We forked MySQL, created MariaDB and those projects are some of the most popular pieces of software on the planet, not just freed open source software, some of the most popular pieces of software on the planet and their forks. And lastly, we should talk about forked Linux distributions because some of the most popular Linux distributions are forks of another distribution. There's really not that many Linux distributions out there that are actually independent, that they built everything themselves, that their package manager and all of that, they maintain their own repository software. So many of these things started life as simply a fork of an existing project. Ubuntu, the most popular desktop Linux distribution on the planet, and very popular server distribution. Ubuntu essentially started life as a Debian fork, right? They just took Debian, which Debian was not meant for really desktop computer use. It was mainly a server operating system and canonical. The company behind Ubuntu wanted to make an operating system, a Debian operating system for normal computer users, normal PC computer users. So they forked Debian and created Ubuntu. Now, Linux Mint had some problems with the way Ubuntu did things. Mint forked Ubuntu, creating Linux Mint, right? This is the way the world works with free and open source software. And then when SystemD arrived on the scene about a decade ago, you had a lot of forks because of SystemD. A lot of people really didn't like SystemD. They were against it for ideological reasons. So you had a lot of protest distros that sprang up because of SystemD. So you had the Debian team that many people in the Debian team did not want SystemD, so they forked Debian to create Dev1. The same thing with Arch Linux. When Arch Linux moved to SystemD, you had some Arch guys fork Arch Linux to create Artix. And all of these distributions are great distributions. Ubuntu meant Dev1, Artix, right? And they're essentially forked from an existing project. So are forks a good thing? In my opinion, yes. I think forks absolutely are a good thing. I know the reason people complain about forks are when an open source project, something goes screwy with it. A company that we don't like owns it or the maintainers decide to change the license from an open source license to a proprietary license or whatever it happens to be, right? And then we're going to fork this project. And typically it's not just one fork. You get about 15 different forks of that project. And I understand people hate that. It's like, hey, why don't all you guys that are forking it all? Just create one fork and all work on that. And I can understand a lot of people don't. We have this complaint in the freedom of source community that too many people are all working on the same thing apart. Why don't you all work on the same thing together? I get the criticism, but here's the thing. The ones that are worthy, they are going to succeed. And that project will live. The ones that are not worthy, that project will die. The ones that are not going to put in the proper work. Yeah, their projects will die and those projects that die. Hopefully the people that were working on that that still wanted to work on that software will go to the forks that are still alive. So to some things up, you know, if there's a project out there, free and open source project that's going in a way, going in a direction that you don't quite agree with, maybe you're a part of that community and you want to fork it and you want to try going your own way and try to make it something different, something that stands out. I again, I think that's healthy because at the end of the day, we need competition. We need competing ideas. Right. Again, it's kind of it's capitalism at work, really, within the free and open source software community. Right. And those competing ideas, one will win out over the other or maybe both will survive or maybe neither will survive. But again, I think this is part of the healthy organism that is free and open source software. Peace, guys.