Serge Demeyer | Publications | E-mail Feedback
Last updated on Thursday, November 16, 2023
@inproceedings{Businge2022saner,
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
author = {John Businge and Ahmed Zerouali and Alexandre Decan and
Tom Mens and Serge Demeyer and Coen De Roover},
booktitle = {Proceedings {SANER 2022} (IEEE International
Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and
Reengineering)},
month = {mar},
pages = {867-877},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
title = {Variant Forks - Motivations and Impediments},
year = {2022},
abstract = {Social coding platforms centred around git provide
explicit facilities to share code between projects:
forks, pull requests, cherry-picking to name but a
few. Variant forks are an interesting phenomenon in
that respect, as they permit for different projects
to peacefully co-exist, yet explicitly acknowledge
the common ancestry. Several researchers analysed
forking practices on open source platforms and
observed that variant forks get created frequently.
However, little is known on the motivations for
launching such a variant fork. Is it mainly technical
(e.g., diverging features), governance (e.g.,
diverging interests), legal (e.g., diverging
licences), or do other factors come into play? We
report the results of an exploratory qualitative
analysis on the motivations behind creating and
maintaining variant forks. We surveyed 105
maintainers of different active open source variant
projects hosted on GitHub. Our study extends previous
findings, identifying a number of fine-grained common
motivations for launching a variant fork and listing
concrete impediments for maintaining the co-existing
projects.},
annote = {internationalconference},
doi = {10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00105},
issn = {1534-5351},
url = {https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/
SANER53432.2022.00105},
}