OT: Patching a source makes it a fork?

[drago01]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm part curious and part venting....
>
> I am trying to get a cross-platform project I'm working on building natively
> on win32 as I've already got it working nicely on Fedora and Fedora mingw.
>
> I've ended up with the MSYS2 project, which while a big young (try to find
> documentation!) I think it's a vast improvement on the old msys/mingw
> project.
>
> I was having trouble with the wxWidgets cmake module messing up the parsing
> up the output from wx-config and I found the problem and provided a
> *TRIVIAL* patch.
>
> Next this guy tells me that we should upstream it (sure, always a good idea)
> and wait until they incorporate it to fix it on msys2, which of course would
> leave me without a working build (except for the fact i already fixed it for
> myself) and anyone else who needed it to work.
>
> I thought I was done but next I was told:
> """
> OTOH when you apply a patch you are forking the project. This has severe
> consequences for the community (and creates extra work for the
> maintainers.) Right now MSYS2 CMake has a single, simple patch which is
> related to MSYS2 itself, while your patch addresses a CMake bug which is
> not MSYS2-specific. The moment Alexey applies it, he is taking the role
> of CMake maintainer. Multiply this by the hundreds of packages MSYS2
> has...
> """
>
> Does patching software legally make it a fork?

I don't know how forking is defined legally or if it is at all but
technical yes it is a fork ... but so what?