%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel
%+ Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais = Federal University of Minas Gerais [Belo Horizonte, Brazil] (UFMG)
%+ Federal University of Piauí
%+ University of Waterloo [Waterloo]
%A Avelino, Guilherme
%A Passos, Leonardo
%A Hora, Andre
%A Valente, Marco, Tulio
%Z Part 4: Case Studies
%< avec comité de lecture
%( IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
%B 13th IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS)
%C Buenos Aires, Argentina
%Y Federico Balaguer
%Y Roberto Di Cosmo
%Y Alejandra Garrido
%Y Fabio Kon
%Y Gregorio Robles
%Y Stefano Zacchiroli
%I Springer International Publishing
%3 Open Source Systems: Towards Robust Practices
%V AICT-496
%P 151-163
%8 2017-05-22
%D 2017
%R 10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_15
%K Code authorship
%K Linux kernel
%K Developer networks
%Z Computer Science [cs]Conference papers
%X 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.
%G English
%Z TC 2
%Z WG 2.13
%2 https://inria.hal.science/hal-01776321/document
%2 https://inria.hal.science/hal-01776321/file/432701_1_En_15_Chapter.pdf
%L hal-01776321
%U https://inria.hal.science/hal-01776321
%~ IFIP
%~ IFIP-AICT
%~ IFIP-TC
%~ IFIP-WG
%~ IFIP-OSS
%~ IFIP-TC2
%~ IFIP-WG2-13
%~ IFIP-AICT-496