Exploratory Analysis of Open Source Software Forks

摘要

Although a number of studies have been carried out in order to identify relationship between various quality attributes of closed and open source software, a little effort has been done so far with respect to cloning and forking. Our research is aiming at bridging this gap. The goal of the paper is to study to which extend the assumptions of earlier studies of other researcher are valid for the case of open source software forks.Our exploratory case study is based on analysis of three generations of eMule mods. The Pearson product moment correlation analysis was used to indentify quantitative relations between quality attributes of those mods. Our results indicate strong, statistically significant correlations between several internal and external quality attributes.