Exploring Code Ownership Concentration in the Linux Kernel
Resumo
A fundamental aspect determining the design, evolution, and maintenance of a software project is the set of values, practices, and methods its contributors follow throughout its development. In large software projects, practices and policies commonly vary for individual software components (subsystems) or subordinate subprojects. While the project-level organization and context provide a common background for their subprojects, the internal developer hierarchies and the contributions of these subprojects to the parent project give rise to differences in how developer subcommunities coauthor components of large software projects.We conduct a case study on the distribution of ownership concentration metrics across Linux kernel subsystems to explore how subproject-level development models affect process metrics extracted from a common software codebase. We found a statistically significant difference in the distributions of minor and major contributors across subsystems, as well as considerable disparities in the strength of correlations between ownership concentration and local code metrics. Our results reveal how the development model of a single project can vary across its software components and point to the benefits of mining software repositories with awareness of a project’s context, domain, and developer organization.
Palavras-chave:
Ownership Concentration, CodeOwnership, Software Maintenance, Open Source Software
Referências
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Vincenzo Orrei, Marco Raglianti, Csaba Nagy, and Michele Lanza. 2023. Contribution-Based Firing of Developers?. In Proceedings of the 31st Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). ACM, 2062–2066. DOI: 10.1145/3611643.3613085
Rafael Passos, Arthur Pilone, David Tadokoro, and Paulo Meirelles. 2025. Streamlining Analyses on the Linux Kernel with DUKS. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). 125–128. DOI: 10.1109/VISSOFT67405.2025.00025
Eduardo Pinheiro and Paulo Meirelles. 2024. Understanding Group Maintainership Model in the Linux Kernel Development. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Visualization, Maintenance and Evolution (VEM) (Curitiba/PR). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, 113–124.
Foyzur Rahman and Premkumar Devanbu. 2011. Ownership, experience and defects: a fine-grained study of authorship. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, 491–500. DOI: 10.1145/1985793.1985860
Foyzur Rahman and Premkumar Devanbu. 2013. How, and why, process metrics are better. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, San Francisco, CA, USA, 432–441. [link]
Eric S. Raymond. 1998. Homesteading the noosphere. First Monday 3, 10 (1998). [link]
Skipper Seabold and Josef Perktold. 2010. statsmodels: Econometric and statistical modeling with python. In Proceedings of the 9th Python in Science Conference (scipy).
Roman Suvorov, Meiyappan Nagappan, Ahmed E. Hassan, Ying Zou, and Bram Adams. 2012. An empirical study of build system migrations in practice: Case studies on KDE and the Linux kernel. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM). IEEE, 160–169. DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405267
Xin Tan, Minghui Zhou, and Brian Fitzgerald. 2020. Scaling open source communities: an empirical study of the Linux kernel. In Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, 1222–1234. DOI: 10.1145/3377811.3380920
Ole Tange. 2023. GNU Parallel 20231122 (’Grindavík’). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10199085
Patanamon Thongtanunam and Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn. 2024. Code Ownership: The Principles, Differences, and Their Associations with Software Quality. In Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE). IEEE, 379–390. DOI: 10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00044
Xiao Yu, Lei Liu, Xing Hu, Jin Liu, and Xin Xia. 2025. Where Is Self-admitted Code Generated by Large Language Models on GitHub?. In Proceedings of the 32nd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC). IEEE, 407–418. DOI: 10.1109/APSEC66846.2025.00047
Minghui Zhou, Qingying Chen, Audris Mockus, and Fengguang Wu. 2017. On the scalability of Linux kernel maintainers’ work. In Proceedings of the 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). ACM, Paderborn Germany, 27–37. DOI: 10.1145/3106237.3106287
The kernel development community 2001. Submitting patches: the essential guide to getting your code into the kernel. The kernel development community. Retrieved May. 10th, 2026 from [link]
Guilherme Avelino, Leonardo Passos, Andre Hora, and Marco Tulio Valente. 2017. Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 496. Springer, 151–163. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_15
Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy, Harald Gall, and Premkumar Devanbu. 2011. Don’t touch my code! examining the effects of ownership on software quality. In Proceedings of the 19th SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering (ESEC/FSE). ACM, 4–14. DOI: 10.1145/2025113.2025119
Ivan T. Bowman, Richard C. Holt, and Neil V. Brewster. 1999. Linux as a case study: its extracted software architecture. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 555–563. DOI: 10.1145/302405.302691
Frederick P. Brooks. 1978. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1st ed.). Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., USA.
Melvin E Conway. 1968. How do committees invent. Datamation 14, 4 (1968), 28–31.
Jonathan Corbet. [n. d.]. Finding real-world kernel subsystems. [link] [Online; Last accessed on May. 10th, 2026].
Jonathan Corbet. 2001. Group maintainership models. Retrieved May. 10th, 2026 from [link]
Valerio Cosentino, Javier Luis Canovas Izquierdo, and Jordi Cabot. 2015. Assessing the bus factor of Git repositories. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER). IEEE, 499–503. DOI: 10.1109/SANER.2015.7081864
Otávio Cury and Guilherme Avelino. 2025. The Impact of Generative AI on Code Expertise Models: An Exploratory Study. In Proceedings of the 39th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES). SBC, 706–712. DOI: 10.5753/sbes.2025.11074
Matthieu Foucault, Jean-Rémy Falleri, and Xavier Blanc. 2014. Code ownership in open-source software. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE). ACM, 1–9. DOI: 10.1145/2601248.2601283
T. Girba, A. Kuhn, M. Seeberger, and S. Ducasse. 2005. How developers drive software evolution. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE’05). 113–122. DOI: 10.1109/IWPSE.2005.21
Michaela Greiler, Kim Herzig, and Jacek Czerwonka. 2015. Code ownership and software quality: a replication study. In Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (MSR ’15). IEEE, Florence, Italy, 2–12. [link]
Eirini Kalliamvakou, Georgios Gousios, Kelly Blincoe, Leif Singer, Daniel M. German, and Daniela Damian. 2014. The promises and perils of mining GitHub. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 92–101. DOI: 10.1145/2597073.2597074
The kernel development community. [n. d.]. How the development process works: Mailing lists. Retrieved May. 10th, 2026 from [link]
Jiajun Li, Wenhua Yang, Minxue Pan, and Yu Zhou. 2025. Understanding Feature Request Practice on GitHub via a Large-Scale Empirical Study. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). IEEE, 2783–2794. DOI: 10.1109/ASE63991.2025.00228
Xiaozhu Meng, Barton P. Miller, William R. Williams, and Andrew R. Bernat. 2013. Mining Software Repositories for Accurate Authorship. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM). IEEE, 250–259. DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2013.36
Mohit and Kuljit Kaur Chahal. 2026. Community engagement and the lifespan of open-source software projects. Information and Software Technology 189 (Jan. 2026), 107914. DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2025.107914
Florent Moriconi, Thomas Durieux, Jean-Rémy Falleri, Raphaël Troncy, and Aurélien Francillon. 2025. GHALogs: Large-Scale Dataset of GitHub Actions Runs. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, 669–673. DOI: 10.1109/MSR66628.2025.00104
Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. 2017. Revisiting Turnover-Induced Knowledge Loss in Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). IEEE, 261–272. DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2017.64
Gianlorenzo Occhipinti, Csaba Nagy, Roberto Minelli, and Michele Lanza. 2023. SYN: Ultra-Scale Software Evolution Comprehension. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC). IEEE, 69–73. DOI: 10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00020
Vincenzo Orrei, Marco Raglianti, Csaba Nagy, and Michele Lanza. 2023. Contribution-Based Firing of Developers?. In Proceedings of the 31st Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). ACM, 2062–2066. DOI: 10.1145/3611643.3613085
Rafael Passos, Arthur Pilone, David Tadokoro, and Paulo Meirelles. 2025. Streamlining Analyses on the Linux Kernel with DUKS. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). 125–128. DOI: 10.1109/VISSOFT67405.2025.00025
Eduardo Pinheiro and Paulo Meirelles. 2024. Understanding Group Maintainership Model in the Linux Kernel Development. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Visualization, Maintenance and Evolution (VEM) (Curitiba/PR). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, 113–124.
Foyzur Rahman and Premkumar Devanbu. 2011. Ownership, experience and defects: a fine-grained study of authorship. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, 491–500. DOI: 10.1145/1985793.1985860
Foyzur Rahman and Premkumar Devanbu. 2013. How, and why, process metrics are better. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, San Francisco, CA, USA, 432–441. [link]
Eric S. Raymond. 1998. Homesteading the noosphere. First Monday 3, 10 (1998). [link]
Skipper Seabold and Josef Perktold. 2010. statsmodels: Econometric and statistical modeling with python. In Proceedings of the 9th Python in Science Conference (scipy).
Roman Suvorov, Meiyappan Nagappan, Ahmed E. Hassan, Ying Zou, and Bram Adams. 2012. An empirical study of build system migrations in practice: Case studies on KDE and the Linux kernel. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM). IEEE, 160–169. DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405267
Xin Tan, Minghui Zhou, and Brian Fitzgerald. 2020. Scaling open source communities: an empirical study of the Linux kernel. In Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, 1222–1234. DOI: 10.1145/3377811.3380920
Ole Tange. 2023. GNU Parallel 20231122 (’Grindavík’). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10199085
Patanamon Thongtanunam and Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn. 2024. Code Ownership: The Principles, Differences, and Their Associations with Software Quality. In Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE). IEEE, 379–390. DOI: 10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00044
Xiao Yu, Lei Liu, Xing Hu, Jin Liu, and Xin Xia. 2025. Where Is Self-admitted Code Generated by Large Language Models on GitHub?. In Proceedings of the 32nd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC). IEEE, 407–418. DOI: 10.1109/APSEC66846.2025.00047
Minghui Zhou, Qingying Chen, Audris Mockus, and Fengguang Wu. 2017. On the scalability of Linux kernel maintainers’ work. In Proceedings of the 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). ACM, Paderborn Germany, 27–37. DOI: 10.1145/3106237.3106287
Publicado
11/09/2026
Como Citar
PILONE, Arthur; MEIRELLES, Paulo.
Exploring Code Ownership Concentration in the Linux Kernel. In: WORKSHOP DE VISUALIZAÇÃO, EVOLUÇÃO E MANUTENÇÃO DE SOFTWARE (VEM), 14. , 2026, São Paulo/SP.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 14-20.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/vem.2026.32393.
