If you use any standard open source license, users are not obligated to fork your project. You can request that they do so, but there's no obligation under any

If you use any standard open source license, users are not obligated to fork your project. You can request that they do so, but there's no obligation under any OSI-approved license (MIT, BSD, GPL, Apache, etc). For various reasons, I occasionally clone instead of fork an open source project I use, but I'm always careful to put a link to the original project at the top of my README. Also, updates are not magically merged to upstream Github repos, regardless of whether they're forked or cloned. The user has to merge any updates manually either way, unless you script these merges using Bash or some similar approach. tldr: forking is a tool, not a rule.