Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel
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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 the number of files per author is highly skewed — a small group of top authors (3 are responsible for at most 11 files; (c) most authors (62 profile; (d) authors with a high number of co-authorship connections tend to collaborate with others with less connections.
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