Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

Forking: The Nuclear Option That Keeps Everyone Honest

In 1970, economist Albert Hirschman published a little book called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that forever changed how we think about power. His insight was elegant: when something’s going wrong in an organization, you have two options. You can use voice (complain, vote, organize, protest) or you can use exit (leave). Loyalty determines which one you reach for first.

Here’s the problem with exit in most of human history: it’s expensive. Leaving your country means abandoning family, language, career, and often risking death. Leaving your job means losing income. Leaving your religion means social exile. Exit has always been the nuclear option—available in theory, catastrophic in practice.

Then programmers invented something weird: exit that costs almost nothing.

They called it forking.

What Is Forking?

A fork happens when someone takes a copy of an existing project—the complete codebase, documentation, history, everything—and starts their own independent version. The original project continues. The fork continues. Users and developers choose which one to follow.

Think of it like this: imagine if, every time you disagreed with your government, you could make an exact copy of the entire country—all the infrastructure, institutions, and accumulated knowledge—and run it your way. The original country keeps existing. Your version keeps existing. People vote with their feet.

In software, this isn’t a thought experiment. It’s Tuesday.

The Linux kernel has been forked thousands of times. Every major Linux distribution—Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch—is either a fork or a fork of a fork of a fork. The family tree looks less like a tree and more like a tangled root system after an earthquake.

And here’s the thing: this apparent chaos produces remarkable results.

The LibreOffice Story: How Forking Saved an Office Suite

In 2008, Sun Microsystems owned OpenOffice.org, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Then Oracle bought Sun. The community got nervous.

Oracle had a… reputation. They’d sued Google over Java. They’d closed the source on OpenSolaris. And crucially, they required contributors to sign over copyright—meaning Oracle owned everything, even code written by volunteers in their spare time.

On September 28, 2010, the community called Oracle’s bluff.

They announced The Document Foundation, forked the entire codebase, and named it LibreOffice. They invited Oracle to participate. Oracle declined. The fork became permanent.

What happened next was remarkable. Within two weeks, 80 new developers joined. Major organizations—Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, Google—shifted their support from Oracle to the fork. Six months later, Oracle gave up entirely, donating the original codebase to Apache.

The fork won. Not through lawyers, not through legislation, not through violence. Just by offering a better deal and letting people choose.

This pattern repeats:

• MariaDB forked from MySQL the day Oracle announced its purchase of Sun. Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL’s original creator, took a swath of developers with him. Today MariaDB powers WordPress, Wikipedia, and countless other services that didn’t trust Oracle with their data.
• OpenTofu forked from Terraform when HashiCorp changed the license from open-source to proprietary. Within months, the fork had more contributors than the original.
• Valkey forked from Redis after a similar license change—and immediately got backing from the Linux Foundation.

The threat of forking disciplines corporate behavior. The ability to fork means never having to say “please.”

The Bitcoin Wars: When Money Forks

Software is one thing. Money is another.

On August 1, 2017, Bitcoin split in two.

The debate had been brewing for years: Bitcoin’s blocks were too small. Only about seven transactions per second could fit through the bottleneck. Transaction fees spiked. Confirmation times stretched. Some wanted bigger blocks. Others wanted “second layer” solutions like the Lightning Network.

Neither side would budge. So they didn’t.

At block 478,559, Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Everyone who owned one bitcoin suddenly owned one of each. The blockchain’s history up to that moment was identical. After that moment, two different futures.

Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor, still calls Bitcoin Cash the “real Bitcoin”—the one that stays true to Satoshi’s original whitepaper. The BTC camp says Ver’s chasing a fantasy. The debate continues to this day. Both chains still exist. The market decides which matters more.

But here’s what didn’t happen: no courts, no legislation, no violence, no coercion. Just a clean split. Take your beliefs and go build.

The DAO Hack: When Forking Gets Philosophical

The Ethereum fork of 2016 reveals something deeper about what forking really means.

The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was a crowdfunded investment vehicle built on Ethereum smart contracts. It raised $150 million worth of Ether—roughly 14% of all Ether in existence at the time. Then a hacker found a vulnerability and drained $60 million.

The money sat in a “child DAO,” frozen for 28 days before the hacker could withdraw. The Ethereum community had a choice: let the hack stand, or rewrite history.

They voted to rewrite.

On July 20, 2016, Ethereum hard-forked to return the stolen funds. The hack never happened—at least on the new chain.

But not everyone agreed. A minority said the whole point of “code is law” was that it was actually law. The hacker had exploited a bug in the contract, but hadn’t broken any rules of the protocol. Changing the blockchain to reverse a “legal” transaction violated the entire premise of trustless systems.

That minority kept running the old chain. They called it Ethereum Classic.

Today, both chains still exist. Ethereum (ETH) is worth hundreds of billions. Ethereum Classic (ETC) is worth… less. The market spoke. But the philosophical point remains: when the community disagreed about fundamental values—pragmatism vs. immutability—they didn’t have to fight. They just forked.

The Costs of Forking: Why It’s Not All Rainbows

Let’s not get carried away. Forking has real downsides.

Fragmentation destroys network effects. Every fork splits the developer talent pool, the user base, the documentation, the institutional knowledge. The Bitcoin Cash fork created significant brand confusion and community division. Then Bitcoin Cash itself forked into BCH and BSV in 2018. The original Bitcoin community is now scattered across multiple competing chains, each claiming to be the “real” vision.

Security degrades. Contentious forks make both chains more vulnerable. The Bitcoin Gold attack in 2018 exploited chain vulnerabilities resulting in over $18 million in double-spending losses. Smaller chains have fewer miners, which means easier 51% attacks.

Governance gets messier. When forking is easy, governance becomes harder. Why negotiate when you can just leave? The Ethereum community now uses Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and on-chain voting specifically to reduce the need for contentious hard forks—because every fork costs money, time, and trust.

Compatibility fractures. The Linux distribution family tree is so complex that DistroWatch maintains a visual genealogy chart just to keep track. Debian has spawned roughly 250 derivatives. Software that works on Ubuntu might break on Arch. The freedom to fork creates the burden of incompatibility.

Forking is like democracy: terrible, except for all the alternatives.

Forking as Governance: The Discipline of Exit

Here’s what makes forking genuinely revolutionary for governance theory: the mere possibility of forking changes behavior, even when no fork actually happens.

From the Technology Innovation Management Review:

“The possibility of forking—others going off and creating their own separate project—can be such a powerful force that informal governance can be remarkably effective. Rather than specific rules designed to foster decisions that consider all the interests, the possibility that others will take their efforts/resources elsewhere motivates participants to find common ground.”

This is Hirschman’s insight turbocharged. When exit is easy, voice becomes more powerful—because the threat of exit makes people listen. You don’t have to actually fork. You just have to credibly threaten to fork. The mere existence of the option disciplines the leadership.

Linux kernel development is famously autocratic—Linus Torvalds has final say on what gets merged. But Linus can’t become a tyrant, because if he did, the community would fork the kernel tomorrow. His authority exists precisely because he exercises it wisely enough that forking seems unnecessary. The nuclear option keeps the conventional option honest.

In traditional politics, this discipline barely exists. You can’t fork the United States. You can emigrate, but you can’t take the Constitution, the institutions, and the accumulated infrastructure with you. Exit means starting from scratch. That’s why bad governance can persist for decades—the cost of leaving exceeds the cost of staying.

But what if you could fork a country?

From Software to Society: The Unscarcity Connection

The Unscarcity framework’s EXIT Protocol and Commons architecture are, in essence, attempts to make forking possible for civilization itself.

Consider the pieces:

The Foundation travels with you. In the MOSAIC, your access to housing, food, energy, and healthcare isn’t tied to a specific Commons. When you leave one community for another, your Foundation guarantee comes with you. Exit doesn’t mean destitution. This is like being able to fork with all your accumulated resources intact.

Commons can specialize radically. The Kyoto Heritage Commons bans neural laces. The Synthesis Commons enables consciousness merging. New Geneva runs weekly governance experiments. These aren’t minor policy differences—they’re fundamentally different visions of human flourishing. The system protects this diversity because Axiom V (Difference Sustains Life) recognizes that uniformity is fragile.

The Diversity Guard prevents monopoly capture. Major decisions in the MOSAIC require consensus across genuinely different Commons. No single faction can rewrite the rules for everyone. But if a faction truly believes in a different path, they can… fork. Build their own Commons with different local rules. Let the experiment run.

Voice is preserved through local governance. Each Commons handles its own internal decisions—assemblies, liquid democracy, AI-assisted deliberation, whatever the community chooses. Voice works within your chosen community. Exit works between communities. Both options remain open.

The historical precedent is the Hanseatic League: 200+ cities coordinating trade across the Baltic for five centuries without a king, emperor, or central army. When a city disagreed with League policy, it could leave. When it agreed, it stayed. That ongoing choice—the permanent availability of exit—kept the League responsive to member interests for longer than most empires last.

The Open Question: Can Forking Scale?

Software forking works because code is perfectly copyable. Blockchain forking works because ledger history is perfectly copyable. Can civilizational forking work when physical resources aren’t?

The honest answer: we don’t know yet.

The Unscarcity framework bets that abundance technology changes the equation. When energy is essentially free (fusion), when manufacturing is essentially free (advanced robotics), when coordination is essentially free (AI logistics)—the “copy cost” of infrastructure drops toward zero. A new Commons wouldn’t need to rebuild everything from scratch. It could deploy automated systems that replicate proven designs.

This isn’t proven. It’s a hypothesis being tested in Free Zones.

But the principle matters regardless of scale. Forking represents something profound: the ability to peacefully disagree about fundamental values without requiring one side to dominate the other.

In traditional politics, if you believe in different principles than your neighbors, your options are: convince them (voice), leave and start over (costly exit), or impose your view through force. The first option often fails. The second option is often impossible. The third option creates the horror show of history.

Forking offers a fourth path: disagree, copy the infrastructure, and prove your case by building something better. Let reality adjudicate.

It’s not perfect. It fragments communities. It complicates coordination. It may not work for physical resources the way it works for digital ones.

But it’s the first genuine alternative to the ancient pattern of “convince, leave, or conquer.”

And that might be worth the complications.

Connection to the Unscarcity vision: Forking is the technical implementation of Axiom III (Freedom is Reciprocal) applied to governance. Your freedom to build a different kind of community doesn’t require destroying anyone else’s community. The EXIT Protocol for individuals and the Commons architecture for communities both draw on this principle: peaceful disagreement through parallel experimentation rather than winner-take-all conflict. When forking is possible, tyranny becomes self-defeating—any attempt to impose unwanted rules simply accelerates the exodus to better alternatives. The discipline of exit keeps power honest, and the availability of exit keeps disagreement peaceful.

References

• Hirschman, A.O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Harvard University Press.
• LibreOffice History — Opensource.com
• LibreOffice Timeline — LibreOffice Official
• Bitcoin Cash - Wikipedia — Fork history and block size debate
• The DAO Hack Explained — Gemini Cryptopedia
• Ethereum Classic Origin — BeInCrypto
• MariaDB History — Wikipedia
• Code Forking, Governance, and Sustainability in Open Source Software — Technology Innovation Management Review
• Governance Without Rules: How the Potential for Forking Helps Projects — Opensource.com
• The Rise of Forking in Blockchain: Innovation or Fragmentation? — Open Source For You
• Fork (blockchain) - Wikipedia — Security risks and costs
• Linux Distribution Family Tree — DistroWatch
• History of Linux Distributions — Linux Today