stated that "The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community". He notes in the Jargon File:

David A. Wheeler notes four possible outcomes of a fork, with examples:

# The death of the fork. This is by far the most common case. It is easy to declare a fork, but considerable effort to continue independent development and support.
# A re-merging of the fork (e.g., egcs

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