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Many companies develop software product lines-collections of similar products-by cloning and adapting artifacts of existing product variants. Transforming such cloned product variants into a "single-copy" software product line representation is considered an important software re-engineering activity, as reflected in numerous tools and methodologies available. However, development practices of companies that use cloning to implement product lines have not been systematically studied. This lack of empirical knowledge threatens the validity and applicability of approaches supporting the transformation, and impedes adoption of advanced solutions for systematic software reuse. It also hinders the attempts to improve the solutions themselves. We address this gap with an empirical study conducted to investigate the cloning culture in six industrial software product lines realized via code cloning. Our study …