A while ago, I wrote about some concerns of mine regarding git and github. Today, I was looking around, because I wanted to add the exception_notification code to a site of mine, and ran into this:

http://github.com/rails/exception_notification/network

Scroll all the way to the right, and you’ll see that there are a bunch of relatively current forks, and none of them seem to share recent changes. So which one is the ‘real’ one? My guess would be the one belonging to ‘rails’, but who knows… maybe that one has been abandoned?

Once again, this is nothing ‘new’: it has always been possible to fork open source code. What I wonder about is the mentality of just going off to work on your own stuff without contributing anything back. The results are a bunch of different forks, each of which may potentially contribute something interesting, but none of which appears to have collected all the new work.