forked adj.,vi.
1. [common after 1997, esp. in the Linux community] An
open-source software project is said to have forked or be forked
when the project group fissions into two or more parts pursuing
separate lines of development (or, less commonly, when a third
party unconnected to the project group ). Forking is considered a
Bad Thing - not merely because
it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because
forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and
acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy,
succession, and design direction. There is serious social
pressure against forking. As a result, major forks (such as the
Gnu-Emacs/XEmacs split, the fissionings of the 386BSD group into
three daughter project, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are
rare enough that they are remembered individually in hacker
folklore. 2. [Unix; uncommon; prob. influenced by a mainstream
expletive] Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system
was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent fork bomb.