What you're describing with the 'fork' button is incorrect. When you fix something on your own branch, nobody on earth but yourself benefits from it. For this t

What you're describing with the 'fork' button is incorrect. When you fix something on your own branch, nobody on earth but yourself benefits from it. For this to work, you have to contribute your work back and (the hard part), the original owners have to accept it. And that's where open source usually breaks down. Another point of the original post is that monkey patching is the kiss of death of many Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects.