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 begins
its own line of development). 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 projects, 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.

