Back in the Bad Old Days(tm) when disks still spun and displays weighed as much as a human, all manner of crap used to go into /usr/local but nobody would ever own it--consequently, you'd have knife fights over versions of Perl, for example. Eventually my VP turned to me as a noted BOFH and asked "This is getting out of hand, should we just delete it?" "Depends--will you fire anybody who gives me static?" "Yes." "Consider it gone."

So, I warned people for 4 weeks that everything not owned by somebody was going away. Then at 3 weeks. And at 2, 1. Then at 3 days, 2 days, the day before twice. Through all this only a single soul signed up (and it was an intern ordered to--we transferred the intern to my group and gave his manager a ding and a tongue-lashing later. But that's a different story for after more alcohol).

And finally on the magic day, I wiped it out (with a backup of course).

All holy hell broke loose. Everybody trooped to my cubicle.

To which my response was: "Great! You're here so we now know that you depend on something in /usr/local. So, which package are you the owner of?" Half of them would start screaming. Probably a third would start begging.

To which my response was: "Look. This isn't difficult. You have a dependency. Sign someone up from your group to manage the dependency. Then I'll put it back."

In spite of that, 90% of them walked away without signing up. Being dead in the water and hoping for some other poor fool to take ownership was considered less problematic than signing up for global ownership of a software tool.

That's how crappy "ownership" is in a company.