Git - a Distributed System
Let's say that Alice is the developer, she can pull changes/branches from multiple remotes such as GitHub, GitLab, and even another developer Bob. Our first remote will be, but not necessarily, named as origin by default, in fact, we can name it whatever we like.
Legend
green: local copy of a remote branch, not necessary has extactly the same commits as the branch on the remote computer and therefore fetch/pull from remote is needed
red: local branch, we very likely have some more commits during development
In GitExtensions, the remote branches are often colored green as well as prefixed with the remote name, for example origin/master in below image is the snapshot of the master branch we got from the remote origin
GitHub's Fork Workflow
GitHub has a fork and pull request mode to encourage developers to contribute even when they don't have permission to commit to the original repository. For example Alice forked GitExtensions on GitHub to her own GitHub account as Alice/GitExtensions, she may set Alice/GitExtensions as the origin and the official GitExtensions/GitExtensions as upstream. Since she doesn't have permission to push to the official repository, she will only push commits to her own Alice/GitExtensions, and then create a pull request from Alice/GitExtensions to GitExtensions/GitExtensions so that the owner can review to merge it.
If Alice wants some changes from Bob who also forked the repository, she can add Bob as another remote and fetch and merge Bob's change.
When we have permission of the original repository
We can push our branch and create pull request to the original repository directly without creating a fork.
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