Socio-Technical Dependencies in Forked OSS Projects: Evidence from the BSD Family
M. M. Mahbubul Syeed, Imed Hammouda · Journal of Software · 2014
Existing studies show that open source projectsmay enjoy high level of socio-technical congruence despitetheir open and distributed character. Such observation isyet to be confirmed in the case of forking, where projectsoriginating from the same root evolve in parallel and aretypically lead by different development teams. In this paper,we empirically investigate the endogenous and exogenouscharacteristics of BSD family projects related to socio-technical congruence. Our motivation is that BSD family,as a representative example of forked projects, share acommon development ground for both the code-base andthe development community, which may influence theirevolution from a socio-technical perspective. Our studyresults show that the BSD family maintain a certain levelof collaboration throughout the project history, mainly dueto a shared portion of the community. This partly explainsthe relative harmony of socio-technical congruence levels inthe BSD projects.