A majority of OSS projects fails due to their inability to garner significant and sustained developer community participation. The problem proliferates when competing projects emerge from the source code of an existing project, a phenomenon called forking of the original project, claiming existing and potential developer community participation. In this study, we empirically analyze the influence of forking on the sustainability of the developer community participation in the original project. Further, we try to explain the observed behavior in terms of the characteristics of the project observed at the time of forking. A large-scale study of 2,217 projects hosted on GitHub shows that 1 in every 5 original projects observes a decline in the sustainability of the developer community participation after forking. We find that the negative effect is more pronounced in projects ported to GitHub from other platforms (\u2248 20%), compared to GitHub developed projects (\u2248 9%). We also find that the observed behavior can be explained in terms of the characteristics of the competing projects at the time of forking. For instance, in medium sized projects an increase in the maturity of the original project by a year decreases the odds of decline in the sustainability of the developer participation by 23%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A majority of OSS projects fails due to their inability to garner significant and sustained developer community participation. The problem proliferates when competing projects emerge from the source code of an existing project, a phenomenon called forking of the original project, claiming existing and potential developer community participation. 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