Fork Entropy: Assessing the Diversity of Open Source Software Projects' Forks

On open source software (OSS) platforms such as GitHub, forking and accepting pull-requests is an important approach for OSS projects to receive contributions, especially from external contributors who cannot directly commit into the source repositories. Having a large number of forks is often considered as an indicator of a project being popular. While extensive studies have been conducted to understand the reasons of forking, communications between forks, features and impacts of forks, there are few quantitative measures that can provide a simple yet informative way to gain insights about an OSS project's forks besides their count. Inspired by studies on biodiversity and OSS team diversity, in this paper, we propose an approach to measure the diversity of an OSS project's forks (i.e., its fork population). We devise a novel fork entropy metric based on Rao's quadratic entropy to measure such diversity according to the forks' modifications to project files. With properties including symmetry, continuity, and monotonicity, the proposed fork entropy metric is effective in quantifying the diversity of a project's fork population. To further examine the usefulness of the proposed metric, we conduct empirical studies with data retrieved from fifty projects on GitHub. We observe significant correlations between a project's fork entropy and different outcome variables including the project's external productivity measured by the number of external contributors' commits, acceptance rate of external contributors' pull-requests, and the number of reported bugs. We also observe significant interactions between fork entropy and other factors such as the number of forks. The results suggest that fork entropy effectively enriches our understanding of OSS projects' forks beyond the simple number of forks, and can potentially support further research and applications.