The little legacy code that could: a fable of software ownership – CircleCI

There are four main reasons that ownership of a piece of software is either murky or nonexistent:

The people who wrote it aren’t there anymore;
There used to be an owner, but the team re-org’d, and that ownership shifted/dissipated;
The old software was deprecated, but a new thing didn’t completely replace it;
There was never a defined, clear ownership model at all.