# Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel

## TL;DR

This study analyzes the evolution of code authorship in the Linux kernel, revealing contribution patterns, author specialization, and collaboration structures to inform open-source community management.

## Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of authorship dynamics in the Linux kernel, highlighting contribution distribution, author profiles, and collaboration patterns.

## Key findings

- Only 26% of developers make significant contributions.
- A small group of 3% of authors are responsible for hundreds of files.
- Most authors (62%) are specialists with limited collaboration.

## 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.