Explore foster inner source
The fork-based pull request workflow is popular with open-source projects because it allows anybody to contribute to a project.
You don't need to be an existing contributor or write access to a project to offer your changes.
This workflow isn't just for open source: forks also help support inner source workflows within your company.
Before forks, you could contribute to a project-using Pull Requests.
The workflow is simple enough: push a new branch up to your repository, open a pull request to get a code review from your team, and have Azure Repos evaluate your branch policies.
You can click one button to merge your pull request into main and deploy when your code is approved.
This workflow is great for working on your projects with your team. But what if you notice a simple bug in a different project within your company and you want to fix it yourself?
What if you're going to add a feature to a project that you use, but another team develops?
It's where forks come in; forks are at the heart of inner source practices.
Inner source
Inner source – sometimes called "internal open source" – brings all the benefits of open-source software development inside your firewall.
It opens your software development processes so that your developers can easily collaborate on projects across your company.
It uses the same processes that are popular throughout the open-source software communities.
But it keeps your code safe and secure within your organization.
Microsoft uses the inner source approach heavily.
As part of the efforts to standardize a one-engineering system throughout the company – backed by Azure Repos – Microsoft has also opened the source code to all our projects to everyone within the company.
Before the move to the inner source, Microsoft was "siloed": only engineers working on Windows could read the Windows source code.
Only developers working on Office could look at the Office source code.
So, if you're an engineer working on Visual Studio and you thought that you found a bug in Windows or Office – or wanted to add a new feature – you're out of luck.
But by moving to offer inner sources throughout the company, powered by Azure Repos, it's easy to fork a repository to contribute back.
As an individual making the change, you don't need to write access to the original repository, just the ability to read it and create a fork.