GitHub's fork feature works outside of git itself. It does not utilize the .git directory, and therefore does not utilize git's deduplication. EDIT: Oh, I see

GitHub's fork feature works outside of git itself. It does not utilize the .git directory, and therefore does not utilize git's deduplication. EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. It would definitely be interesting to solve this namespace conflict problem from inside git. I wonder how many times meta-branches (or something similar) have been advocated for.