I observe that people "fork" repositories (which is basically a cheap clone rather than a fork, bad terminology there) not for having a copy of their own to wor

I observe that people "fork" repositories (which is basically a cheap clone rather than a fork, bad terminology there) not for having a copy of their own to work on, but more like a glorified "like/+1/star". So even with public repos, it seems quite acceptable that Github tries to deduplicate aggressively.