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This is when I lose all sympathy for the OP. All of it. Misrepresenting the actual statement this way is garbage. There's a world of difference in the two statements.

I do understand why people clamor to get a patch into the kernel. It's a big deal. Feeling like you've come close and fallen short has to sting.

But, part of having a patch accepted is being able to work with maintainers. Clear fail here. There's a definite air of entitlement in claiming that you're "robbed" of a patch and misrepresenting other people's words and actions.

> Misrepresenting the actual statement this way is garbage. There's a world of difference in the two statements.

That's debatable. What's not debatable is that not giving OP credit for the fix is disrespectful and bordering on plagiarism.

Even if OP's patch wasn't as good as the final one (and giving OP feedback + time to improve their patch themselves isn't an option for some reason), not giving him credit is wrong. This bug would have remained were it not for his effort debugging and developing a fix, and his company investing the development time on it.

I expected the maintainer to be bit of an asshole. Apparently they were totally respectful. They probably figured `Reported-by` is good enough credit, not putting themselves in the author's shoes (we all do this all the time). The author could have e-mailed the maintainer back and ask them to review their attribution practices and that would've been it. Instead they wrote a scathing article.

It’s not debatable at all. It’s simply malicious to put something someone never said in a block quote to make them look bad, especially when the block quote font size is like twice that of everything else. They also cowardly added a “(paraphrasing)” outside to cover their ass. (Edit: in case it’s not clear, I’m not saying they added that after the post was published.)

They achieved their goal: look at how many comments assume that malicious “paraphrasing”. They also made sure those of us who aren’t so quick to jump to conclusions after hearing a one-sided story will never interact with them ever.

The OP did say he was paraphrasing.

Malicious or a mis-remembering?

Conveniently misremembering a quote and making that gross misrepresentation a callout is indistinguishable from malice. I cover my ass by avoiding people who commit deniable acts indistinguishable from malice.

Except that's not what the maintainer said! OP's putting words in their mouths, and getting mad about that. That's not a winning strategy in life, especially where text communication is concerned.

Actions speak louder than words. At the end of the day, the author was not credited for doing most of the work of fixing the bug. I'd be pretty mad too.

Actions do speak loudly - such as misrepresenting other people's statements so they sound worse than they are.

He didn't actually author the patch. He did get a reported by credit. If you look through the thread, he clearly got some mentorship from the maintainers because the first attempts weren't maintainable.

Actions do speak louder than words. The code that ended up getting committed is the only real action here though. Everything else is words. Who wrote the original code, who wrote the commit message, what words were in the commit message. At the end of the day, if we concentrate on the action, and not the words, then we should ignore who said what and look to see if the bug was fixed and if the code works.

Don't get me wrong, I'd absolutely be annoyed too, not to get more credit than a "reported-by", but: you are not your code, and the bug got fixed.

The actions include finding the bug, debugging it, and proposing a strategy for the fix that ended up being adopted in practice. All stuff the maintainer did not do but took credit for.

Especially after OP notes that the issue had been reported on and subsequently ignored for 6 years. Pretty lame behavior by the maintainer IMO.

Except... that's not how it happened at all. OP makes it seem as though the exchange was disrespectful but it really wasn't.

Moreover, what is the guarantee the maintainer won't pull another one, will say that he again likes his version better and point to yet another bug?

The actual thread shows the maintainer implementing the fix in a way he found better and prepping to do the backports for other stable kernels. The actual response was "Thanks for your patch, but I wanted to fix it differently" and gives him credit for reporting.

The suggestion that the maintainer "pulled" something here is quite something. Is there any evidence that the author ever tried to ask for more credit aside from carping about it on their blog in public?

If there was evidence that they'd gone to the maintainer and said "um, hey, I feel like I should get more credit than that" I might feel more sympathetic. As it is, they misrepresented the words of the maintainer and played the victim. If there's evidence they have tried to correct this on list then I might feel differently.

At this point, only Michael Ellerman could have this evidence in his mailbox. I've switched companies since then and unfortunately I don't have the private email exchange which happened between us (I've emailed him from my corporate email address).

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