Why and how developers fork what from whom in GitHub

• Main Authors: JIANG, Jing, LO, David, HE, Jiahuan, XIA, Xin, KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh, ZHANG, Li
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Fork; Open source software; GitHub; Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3705; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4707/viewcontent/WhyHowDevelopersForkGitHub_2017.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Forking is the creation of a new software repository by copying another repository. Though forking is controversial in traditional open source software (OSS) community, it is encouraged and is a built-in feature in GitHub. Developers freely fork repositories, use codes as their own and make changes....