I keep hearing people say they're forking code in Git. Git "fork" sounds suspiciously like Git "clone" plus some (meaningless) psychological willingness to forgo future merges. There is no fork command in Git, right?

GitHub makes forks a little more real by stapling correspondence onto it. That is, you press the fork button and later, when you press the pull request button, the system is smart enough to email the owner. Hence, it's a little bit of a dance around repository ownership and permissions.

Yes/No? Any angst over GitHub extending Git in this direction? Or any rumors of Git absorbing the functionality?