Who Owns This Code? Navigating Code Ownership from Inner to Open Source
summary
Five teams inherit a 10-year TV app codebase that became unrefactorable until ownership is assigned; ownership uses GitHub code-owners + branch protection, rotas for on-call, and AWS resource tagging to map infrastructure. Research cited shows 80% of bug fixes are by non-authors, hard vs soft ownership affects quality and scale, and excessive control or identity attachment creates toxic blockers. A virtual maintainer/trusted-committer model for the shared appcore is in use and reports clearer responsibility and improved code health.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Code ownership challenges
- 1:25Defining ownership
- 8:00Research on ownership models
- 14:15Toxic ownership risks
- 19:30Practical ownership at BBC
- 27:38Hard vs soft ownership
- 34:21Open source responsibilities
- 39:16Summary & Q&A
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