Anil Dash wrote a pretty awesome story over at his blog called “Forking is a Feature”.  His point is that people like Linux Torvalds have taken what used to be seen as a flaw and made it a feature.  Here is a sample of some of the examples in the article:

“Still, forks have had important consequences. Firefox (earlier Firebird and Phoenix) was originally a fork of Mozilla, the open source browser that had been mired in indecision for half a decade. WordPress was born as a fork of B2, a neglected early blogging tool.”

The article is a great read and can help you when debating whether your company should do more with Open Source software. 

What is your favorite forked product?