The fork-based development mechanism provides the flexibility and the unified processes for software teams to collaborate easily in a distributed setting without too much coordination overhead.Currently, multiple social coding platforms support fork-based development, such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Although these different platforms virtually share the same features, they have different emphasis. As GitHub is the most popular platform and the corresponding data is publicly available, most of the current studies are focusing on GitHub hosted projects. However, we observed anecdote evidences that people are confused about choosing among these platforms, and some projects are migrating from one platform to another, and the reasons behind these activities remain unknown.With the advances of Software Heritage Graph Dataset (SWHGD),we have the opportunity to investigate the forking activities across platforms. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on 10popular open-source projects to identify cross-platform forks and investigate the motivation behind. Preliminary result shows that cross-platform forks do exist. For the 10 subject systems in this study, we found 81,357 forks in total among which 179 forks are on GitLab. Based on our qualitative analysis, we found that most of the cross-platform forks that we identified are mirrors of the repositories on another platform, but we still find cases that were created due to preference of using certain functionalities (e.g. Continuous Integration (CI)) supported by different platforms. This study lays the foundation of future research directions, such as understanding the differences between platforms and supporting cross-platform collaboration.

中文翻译：

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从软件遗产数据集中寻找跨平台分叉背后动机的探索性研究

基于fork的开发机制为软件团队在分布式环境下轻松协作提供了灵活性和统一的流程，无需太多的协调开销。 目前有多个社交编码平台支持基于fork的开发，例如GitHub、GitLab和Bitbucket。尽管这些不同的平台实际上具有相同的功能，但它们的侧重点不同。由于 GitHub 是最流行的平台，并且相应的数据是公开的，因此当前的大部分研究都集中在 GitHub 托管的项目上。然而，我们观察到轶事证据表明人们在这些平台之间进行选择时感到困惑，并且一些项目正在从一个平台迁移到另一个平台，而这些活动背后的原因仍然未知。 随着软件遗产图数据集（SWHGD）的进步，我们有机会调查跨平台的分叉活动。在本文中，我们对 10 个流行的开源项目进行了探索性研究，以确定跨平台分叉并调查其背后的动机。初步结果表明确实存在跨平台分叉。对于本研究中的 10 个主题系统，我们总共发现了 81,357 个分叉，其中 179 个分叉在 GitLab 上。根据我们的定性分析，我们发现我们发现的大多数跨平台分支是另一个平台上存储库的镜像，但我们仍然发现由于偏好使用某些功能（例如持续集成（CI））而创建的案例) 受不同平台支持。本研究为未来的研究方向奠定了基础，