Well, the company I am working for is having a team of 4 developers, and each developer has his own domain. To this, it is important to know that we have been working on this piece of software for more than 10 years, with almost no coworker turnover. So, we all have a strong feeling of code ownership, meaning also that we each feel responsible for the specific functions that each of us implemented. Here an example to illustrate it (and in a much greater and different scale): Imagine that you are the architect of the java platform, and that Sun sells java to Oracle. After the transaction, you realize that Oracle does not even care about asking you, the main architect, about how you would go for new features. How would you feel about it? I am sure, like several have expressed it in their opinion here, you would at least go mad in such a situation.