OpenEmbedded and Yocto Project work jointly together to maintain the metadata, layers, tools and sub-projects that make up their ecosystems.
The projects operate through collaborative development. This currently takes place on mailing lists for many components as the "pull request on github" workflow works well for single or small numbers of maintainers but we have a large number, all with different specialisms and benefit from the mailing list review process. Changes therefore undergo peer review through mailing lists in many cases.
This file aims to acknowledge people with specific skills/knowledge/interest both to recognise their contributions but also empower them to help lead and curate those components. Where we have people with specialist knowledge in particular areas, during review patches/feedback from these people in these areas would generally carry weight.
This file is maintained in OE-Core but may refer to components that are separate to it if that makes sense in the context of maintainership. The README of specific layers and components should ultimately be definitive about the patch process and maintainership for the component.
See meta/conf/distro/include/maintainers.inc