Yes.

Until Github came along, "Creating a copy of software for your own personal use" had never been widely-accepted definition of the word "fork" in the context of software development. Forking a project has always involved independent publication and maintenance of said project.

The typical way of copying a project for your own personal use on GitHub involves publishing that copy on GitHub. So, it is a real fork—maybe not a well maintained one, or one that the author is particularly excited about, though!

OK, but that's still not different.

When you fork a project on GitHub, that literally creates a parallel working history, and publishes it under your username. That's what GitHub means by "fork".

So what's the other definition?

Many years ago I would have called that "mirroring", which is definitely not forking.

OK, but a mirror only exists to share an exact (hopefully up-to-date) copy of the repo. So we are just moving the goalpost from the moment you create the fork to the moment you edit it. Did that really change anything? I don't think so.

You can Zeno's-paradox-away the distinction between a bathtub and a kitchen sink, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

This sort of argument change how people understand words, and it also doesn't change how lawyers interpret laws nearly as often as people think. It's still fun, though!

> Oracle bought MySQL and ruined it

By "ruined" you must mean "solved decades-long issues and turned it into a real database", or we're talking about two different projects.

https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-...

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-nutshell.html

Do note that the largest users (like GitHub and Facebook) still use the original MySQL, and AFAIK have no plans to abandon it.