Variant Forks - Motivations and Impediments
Open accessAbstract
Social coding platforms centred around git provide explicit facilities to share code between projects: forks, pull requests, cherry-picking to name but a few. Variant forks are an interesting phenomenon in that respect, as they permit for different projects to peacefully co-exist, yet explicitly acknowledge the common ancestry. Several researchers analysed forking practices on open source platforms and observed that variant forks get created frequently. However, little is known on the motivations for launching such a variant fork. Is it mainly technical (e.g., diverging features), governance (e.g., diverging interests), legal (e.g., diverging licences), or do other factors come into play? We report the results of an exploratory qualitative analysis on the motivations behind creating and maintaining variant forks. We surveyed 105 maintainers of different active open source variant projects hosted on GitHub. Our study extends previous findings, identifying a number of fine-grained common motivations for launching a variant fork and listing concrete impediments for maintaining the co-existing projects.
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Hard forks cannot always be avoided, they are a relatively new phenomenon despite platforms like GitHub lowering the bar and making it easier for people to create them.
“While hard forks cannot always be avoided, they are a relatively new phenomenon despite platforms like GitHub lowering the bar and making it easier for people to create them (Businge et al. 2022).”
From Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events (2026) · cites this paper as Businge et al. 2022
Hard forks can be motivated by legal disputes, technical differences, and vendor competition.
“While hard forks can be motivated by legal disputes (Businge et al. 2022), technical differences (Overhage and Widjaja 2022), and vendor competition (Karhu et al. 2020), the multifacetedness of hard forks remains a bit of a paradox in open source as they represent a significant shock to an open source project, yet provide a path towards sustainability (Nyman et al. 2012;Acquatella et al. 2024) th”
From Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events (2026) · cites this paper as Businge et al. 2022
Cites
Response bias, social desirability and dissimulation
Furnham, A. (1986) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/0191-8869(86)90014-0 · Cited by 1,033 · see citing works
Gamalielsson, J., & Lundell, B. (2014) · Journal of Systems and Software · doi:10.1016/j.jss.2013.11.1077 · Cited by 125 · see citing works
Code Forking, Governance, and Sustainability in Open Source Software
Nyman, L., & Lindman, J. (2013) · Technology Innovation Management Review · doi:10.22215/timreview/644 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
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Foster, D., & Germonprez, M. (2026) · Information Systems Journal · doi:10.1111/isj.70060
- Authors
- Businge, J., Zerouali, A., Decan, A., Mens, T., Demeyer, S., & De Roover, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Antwerp (BE)
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE)
- University of Mons (BE)
- Vrije Universiteit Brussels,Brussels,Belgium
- Venue
- 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2022-03
- Pages
- 867-877
- OpenAlex
- W4286530330
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2
- FWCI
- 2.28
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- orbi.umons.ac.be
- Locations
- IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) (publishedVersion)
- ORBi UMONS (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- VUBIR (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS (O.0157.18F-RG43)
- Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
- Vlaamse regering
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- software forks, open source software, software governance, software licensing, GitHub, software evolution
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