What is Forked? It's a site that resurrects abandoned open source projects. And that's a welcome thing.

Consider the case of Jonathan Gillette, better known as "why the lucky stiff." In 2009, he committed "infocide." He deleted his blog, his Twitter account, and even all the open source software that he'd published on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub.

Gillette had built a few popular applications, including Shoes, a tool kit for building graphical applications with the Ruby programming language, and an interactive tutorial for teaching kids to code. It would have been a shame for the community to lose those projects – and luckily, they didn't. Since many developers had copies of Gillette's code, they were able to resurrect them.

That's the beauty of open source. Because open source licenses allow anyone to modify and redistribute the code of a project, any developer can pick up where a creator left off. Many well known open source applications have been developed this way. WordPress, the popular blogging platform that WIRED and many other websites use, is actually a continuation of a discontinued project called b2.

The trouble is that it's not always easy to find a project's decedents. That's why Belgian developer Schutz Yannick decided to build Forked, a site for finding alternate, actively maintained versions of abandoned open source projects.

Forked is powered by GitHub. GitHub makes it easy for developers to copy the code from a project they're interested in. With just one click, a developer can create a local copy of a project. These copies – called forks in open source parlance – are meant for developers to experiment with making changes, often with the intention of submitting bug fixes or new features to the original project. But they also come in handy when the creator of a project stops updating their code – or deletes it entirely.

You can view a project's list of forks from within GitHub, but Yannick decided the default fork page left something to be desired. "I thought: 'Is it possible to make a better page?'" Yannick says. "And that's the beginning of Forked."

Yes, Yannick had open sourced Forked itself. Yes, it's available on GitHub. And, yes, a few people have already forked it.