Incentives for maintaining high-quality source code

Source code is a medium of communication between human developers. Understandability is the key to maintainable and reusable code. Yet code developed collaboratively with weak ownership is a common property resource that su ers from di usion of responsibility, and hence gradual deterioration. Such misbehavior is usually dealt with with strict usage regulations, e.g. coding rules enforced by reviews. Instead, we take for granted a way to privatize code - e.g. based on authorship information obtained from Subversion - and discuss di fferent ways to reward well-mannered coding, while focussing on friendly self-organization and low coercive power in scienti c environments.