@proceedings {1902, title = {Assessing Code Authorship: The Case of the Linux Kernel}, volume = {496}, year = {2017}, month = {05/2017}, pages = {151-163}, publisher = {Springer}, 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{\textemdash}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.}, keywords = {code authorship, developer network, linux kernel}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_15}, url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_15}, author = {Guilherme Avelino and Passos, Leonardo and Andre Hora and Marco Tulio Valente} }