Guidance for citation of forks

[sdruskat]

I had an interesting (?) case brought to me from colleagues at the Aersopace Center.

• They had forked a repository (original, 10k LOC), and added their own work (own, ~100 LOC, currently living in a branch), and now wanted to provide citation metadata.
• own is not meant to be merged back into original, but lead a life of its own.
• They want to retain original authors as authors, and add own authors.
• There is no usable author metadata for original.

Their question was what should go in an authors field for own. My initial suggestion was to do <own authors>, The original Project.

I think this is a case that may not be explicitly covered by guidance yet. I also have a gut feeling that there are interesting underlying questions about how to treat forks, as works, and with regard to IP and citation.

Perhaps we can discuss this (in this issue at first, or during a call?) and then write something up?
This is also related to the question if we should create a place (or reuse e.g. cite.research-software.org) where existing and new guidance can be easily discovered.