The right to fork describes an effort, relating to an open source project, to break off and to steer the project in a direction that seems to be more appropriate. Both projects continue in parallel, but to different aims.

Unlike with proprietary software, forks can take over as the "official" distribution by being accepted by the bulk of the community, or even re-merge with the original project from which they forked.

A good example might be the EGCS fork from GCC. One group has thought that the project would be better served if it moved forward faster, and since the project is open-sourced, they have every right to take the code and continue working on it to fit their needs.

EGCS development proved sufficiently more vital than GCC development that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, "blessed" EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. Furthermore, the project explicitly adopted the "bazaar" model over the "cathedral" model.

Known Forks

1. Emacs into XEmacs and GNU Emacs.
2. X.org from the XFree86.

See language fork, Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.