[CatMustard]

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"

"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."

"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

[saghm]

I'd be tempted to try to trick them into merging a small change so then they're the new owner and have to figure it out themselves.

[CatMustard]

The Passing of the Curse

[didgetmaster]

Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.

[ozim]

Mostly it is that you don’t go around fixing random stuff.

You might actually get in trouble picking up stuff that is not a priority.

Company I work for is less strict so we do “fix anything Friday”.

But for some other companies you might get a slap on the wrist for not following the plan and product owners pick what gets fixed and what not based on business plan. If there are big customers nagging - bug will be fixed asap.

[Isamu]

Yeah at work I’m paid to own some components that I didn’t write and don’t entirely understand, so I figure my job is to help discover answers for the questions that arise.

I would not want to be a public maintainer though. I don’t have the patience or motivation to use my spare time for that.

[sph]

I like this, turning software maintenance into a long-running game of tag.

[zrail]

I like to refer to it as the cooties ownership model. I.e. once you touch it you have cooties.