a fork is a genesis, not a rupture

A fork is usually treated as a failure: a community that could not agree, a codebase now living twice, a project that split and lost. This record treats it as an operation with a name and a place in the design. Anyone may begin an independent lineage, and the design provides for the act instead of defending against it.

The tension is continuity against exit. If a lineage cannot be left, its participants are subjects of whoever holds its authority, and every dispute is settled by staying and losing. If it can be left trivially, each disagreement becomes a departure and the shared record loses value with every split.

The decision separates the two things a fork could mean. A new lineage begins at its own starting point rather than at a copy of someone else's, inherits only what it declares, and the sole tie to the lineage it came from is whatever cross-references both sides choose to keep. There is no shared authority to inherit and no permission to obtain.

What it costs is duplication, two catalogs to maintain, and the loss of any claim the original could make on the people who left. It also means the design has to work when the same idea exists twice with different answers, which is harder than a rule that forbids the second version.

What it proves is that the team specified the case in which they are the ones being left. Exit was designed as a right held by participants, not as a breach committed against the centre.