Paper Type
full
Description
Increasing numbers of software projects—proprietary and open source—are developed and maintained by heterogeneous communities of developers. As a result, the sustainability of software projects has become an important issue for members of those communities and their user bases. Building on the idea of forking as “an individual developer’s behavior of copying an existing project’s code base” and its signaling of active community involvement and participation, we ask the question: How does forking impact the sustainability of software development projects? Through the curation of digital trace data gathered from 749 software projects hosted on GitHub, we develop a longitudinal model to explain the contributions of various types of forking on software development project sustainability. Our findings contribute to research by moving beyond the conceptualization of forking as a monolithic concept and shows the benefits of certain types of forking for software projects’ sustainability.
Recommended Citation
Negoita, Bogdan; Vial, Gregory; Shaikh, Maha; and Labbe, Aurélie, "Code Forking and Software Development Project Sustainability: Evidence from GitHub" (2019). ICIS 2019 Proceedings. 7.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/is_development/is_development/7
Code Forking and Software Development Project Sustainability: Evidence from GitHub
Increasing numbers of software projects—proprietary and open source—are developed and maintained by heterogeneous communities of developers. As a result, the sustainability of software projects has become an important issue for members of those communities and their user bases. Building on the idea of forking as “an individual developer’s behavior of copying an existing project’s code base” and its signaling of active community involvement and participation, we ask the question: How does forking impact the sustainability of software development projects? Through the curation of digital trace data gathered from 749 software projects hosted on GitHub, we develop a longitudinal model to explain the contributions of various types of forking on software development project sustainability. Our findings contribute to research by moving beyond the conceptualization of forking as a monolithic concept and shows the benefits of certain types of forking for software projects’ sustainability.