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Further on in the email chain, it looks like there is momentum for hard forking under another project named 'SpotBugs' [1, 2]. I hope to see the project live on as it has been useful. Other tools like Google's Error Prone and IntelliJ's inspection toolset are awesome, and FindBugs is complimentary to them.

[1] https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2016-N...

[2] https://github.com/spotbugs/spotbugs

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Side note: "hard fork" has a special meaning for Bitcoin and derivatives, but no meaning for a software fork. I've seen that phrase used several times in the comments though - is this a new trend?

I'm not familiar with Block chain terminology, so I was not aware of the collision.

A previous response in the thread [1] also contains "hard fork", which is probably why I and possibly others have repeated it here.

It could be a trend, but my differentiation (here at least) is that a "hard" fork means that the maintainers themselves are splitting from the original project while also forking the original code base.

It would probably make more sense to just call it a "fork" :).

[1]: https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2016-N...

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