It’s just another meaningless number, but today there are 3,000 forks done of the curl GitHub repository.
This pops up just a little over three years since we reached our first 1,000 forks. Also, 10,000 stars no too long ago.
Why fork?
A typical reason why people fork a project on GitHub, is so that they can make a change in their own copy of the source code and then suggest that change to the project in the form of a pull-request.
The curl project has almost 700 individual commit authors, which makes at least 2,300 forks done who still haven’t had their pull-requests accepted! Of course those are 700 contributors who actually managed to work all the way through to inclusion. We can imagine that there is a huge number of people who only ever thought about doing a change, some who only ever just started to do it, many who ditched the idea before it was completed, some who didn’t actually manage to implement it properly, some who got their idea and suggestion shut down by the project and of course, lots of people still have their half-finished change sitting there waiting for inspiration.
Then there are people who just never had the intention of sending any change back. Maybe they just wanted to tinker with the code and have fun. Some want to do private changes they don’t want to offer or perhaps they already know the upstream project won’t accept.
We just can’t tell.
Many?
Is 3,000 forks a lot or a little? Both. It is certainly more forks than we’ve ever had before in this project. But compared to some of the most popular projects on GitHub, even comparing to some other C projects (on GitHub the most popular projects are never written in C) our numbers are dwarfed by the really popular ones. You can probably guess which ones they are.
In the end, this number is next to totally meaningless as it doesn’t say anything about the project nor about what contributions we get or will get in the future. It tells us we have (or had) the attention of a lot of users and that’s about it.
I will continue to try to make sure we’re worth the attention, both now and going forward!