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Conference Papers Year : 2017

Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel

Abstract

Code authorship is a key information in large-scale open-source systems. Among others, it allows maintainers to assess division of work and identify key collaborators. Interestingly, open-source communities lack guidelines on how to manage authorship. This could be mitigated by setting to build an empirical body of knowledge on how authorship-related measures evolve in successful open-source communities. Towards that direction, we perform a case study on the Linux kernel. Our results show that: (a) only a small portion of developers (26%) makes significant contributions to the code base; (b) the distribution of the number of files per author is highly skewed—a small group of top-authors (3%) is responsible for hundreds of files, while most authors (75%) are responsible for at most 11 files; (c) most authors (62%) have a specialist profile; (d) authors with a high number of co-authorship connections tend to collaborate with others with less connections.
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hal-01776321 , version 1 (24-04-2018)

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Guilherme Avelino, Leonardo Passos, Andre Hora, Marco Tulio Valente. Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel. 13th IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), May 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina. pp.151-163, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_15⟩. ⟨hal-01776321⟩
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