Cloning by Accident: An Empirical Study of Source Code Cloning Across Software Systems

Overview

One of the key goals of open source development is the sharing of knowledge, experience, and solutions that pertain to a software system and its problem domain. Source code cloning is one way in which expertise can be reused across systems; cloning is known to have been used in several open source projects, such as the SCSI drivers of the Linux kernel. This paper discusses two case studies in which the authors performed clone detection on several open source systems within the same domain. In the first case study the authors examined nine text editors written in C, and in the second study eight X-Windows window managers written in C and C++.