Exploring trends and practices of forks in open-source software repositories.

Forking a software repository is a popular and recommended prac­tice among developers. A fork is a copy of the original repository that can evolve independently from the parent repository, allowing developers to experiment with a code base or test new features without the danger of affecting the original project. A fork can result in changes that are pushed back to the original project or even evolve into an independent project. Some projects tend to be forked extensively to the point where their forks are also forked and form families of projects. In this work, we explore the motiva­tion, the practices and the culture of forking open-source software repositories. In particular, we study how forks evolve compared to the parent repository, how they are related to pull requests, how they contribute back to the parent, and how dependencies, in terms of libraries or external modules defined in a build script, are shared or differ within project families. Finally, we relate our findings with how communication and collaboration occurs within software families.