You have to understand
Free Open Source software to understand what a fork is.
When you use free open source software, you might want to do things differently to what the author intended. You might have a great idea the author hates, well you can go ahead and modify it and distribute your version, that is the freedom of open source, and is "a fork".
There is also the fork in a blockchain, but that is similar to a fork in a road.
A "soft fork" means the country dirt road you were following might become paved from that point on, even if your horses where fine walking over dirt, it now allows bicycles and automobiles to move faster.
A "hard fork" means the country dirt road now splits in two, one is exactly the same, the other one is paved from that point on. Of course "forks" might now always be better, they can be worse...
Examples:
BCH forked from BTC, and then BCHABC/BCHSV from BCH...
Libreoffice forked from Openoffice, Xorg forked from Xfree86...
Freedom allows anyone to do a fork, that doesn't mean it will always succeed. And sometimes even the fork ideas get implemented in the original.