Replying to
@akareilly@hachyderm.io
@akareilly@hachyderm.io @pare@kamu.social @tante@tldr.nettime.org the problem with forking isn't technical, it's social. anyone can fork linux. now get enough of the maintainers on board. now convince others to use your kernel over linus'.
projects can, and do, fork all the time, even big ones (emacs/xemacs, gcc/egcs, etc). there's a long and wonderful history of it from the beginning. we're even seeing it happen right now in response to llm-taint. but for the most part you have to piss off the community of maintainers for it to happen. outsiders getting mad isn't enough on its own. you can get a reasonable threat of a fork of linux if enough of the long-term maintainers get mad at linus. that's not impossible.
the reason that "then fork it lol" is considered acceptable is because it sounds like a technical argument and it masks the much more important social one.