# Fork (/academy/fork)



A fork is a plant cutting in your own pot.

The original keeps growing in their window. Your cutting has the same past and a new pot. You water it. You add a weird leaf. You do not need their house key. The [open source](/academy/open-source) license already said you could take a cutting.

On [GitHub](/academy/github), the cutting is a repo under your name. [Git](/academy/git) history comes with it.

**Your pot, their garden**

A [branch](/academy/branch) is still in their shop — a spare bench you plan to [merge](/academy/merge) back. A fork is your shop. Sometimes you never return. Sometimes you grow a fix and send a [pull request](/academy/pull-request): "this leaf worked in my pot, want it?"

People fork to steer, to keep an abandoned plant alive, or because the gardeners disagreed. A surprising number of tools in the [builder](/builder) started as someone else's cutting.

The everyday move is gentler. Fork, change, PR. The fork is just a pot you are allowed to dig in, so you never touch their live soil. Agents via [MCP](/academy/mcp) do this without ceremony: clone your fork, push, open the PR.

**You are allowed to leave**

If a [dependency](/academy/dependency) you need goes dark or hostile, the code is still there to cut — within the license. That off-ramp is why building on public code feels less like a hostage situation. `npx create-hackhaton-space-stack@latest` itself is a cutting you can grow.

**What this unlocks**

A copy you can wreck, steer, or hand back.

Take the cutting. Grow it on your sill.