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Comment by shortcake27 | Hacker News Reader

> Free software is common property. This the rule 0. It's everyone's. This is why four freedoms exist, and The Kernel is GPLv2. i.e. Free Software.

Just because something is free, it doesn’t make it common property. Being able to use the kernel and modify _your own copy_ is not the same as the kernel itself being common property. The four freedoms don’t grant us permission or rights to alter other people’s copies of the software, so those copies are not common property.

> The maintainer didn't have to accept the patch per se. He could have just written "This bug is discovered, dissected and fixed by $THE_PERSON. Patch is implemented and committed by me. Thanks a lot, $THE_PERSON!".

That’s basically what happened, yeah? The author got credit for reporting it.

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> The four freedoms don’t grant us permission or rights to alter other people’s copies of the software, so those copies are not common property.

Of course, but accepting a bug, giving feedback on a submitted patch to be included in the kernel is openly saying "We're willing to accept this, but you need to polish this and that", which the author did.

In practice he got the permission to modify their copy.

> That’s basically what happened, yeah? The author got credit for reporting it.

No, definitely not. They got a "reported-by" tag, which means "the author told me that something is not working, so I did all the work to find why, did all the work to solve, did all the work to implement, did all the work to commit."

In reality, the author found, debugged, solved and patched the problem. The maintainer didn't like the style, pushed his version, and claimed that all work is done by him, except hitting his proverbial foot to a proverbial stone while walking (i.e. discovering the bug).

> In practice he got the permission to modify their copy.

I wouldn’t consider it common property if permission is required. It seems like our definitions of common property differ, but I’m not sure there’s any value in trying to align ourselves on this.

> No, definitely not. They got a "reported-by" tag, which means "somebody told me that something is not working, so I did all the work to find why, did all the work to solve, did all the work to implement, did all the work to commit."

Got it. Yeah I agree this is not the same. However, I still stand by my original stance which is that no one is owed anything, especially when they do something no one asked them to do.

> I’m not sure there’s any value in trying to align ourselves on this.

Same here.

> I still stand by my original stance which is that no one is owed anything, especially when they do something no one asked them to do.

I understand your point, but nothing is mandatory in Free Software. However, this is not about internet points, but it's human decency with consequences.

Strip the event from The Kernel and computer domain, this is plain rude, unjust and unethical. The author says this, and I concur.

First, we need to do better as humans. This is the lesson.

> I understand your point, but nothing is mandatory in Free Software. However, this is not about internet points, but it's human decency with consequences.

The way OP framed it in the blog post, it sure does seem like it's mostly about Internet Points:

    I told him that I would really appreciate if he could accept a patch from me, so that I could receive credit for fixing this issue and become a kernel contributor.

As far as I know, there is no official title of "Kernel Contributor" that comes with a certificate written on parchment. I have code I wrote in the Linux kernel. Am I an official Kernel Contributor? If so, I didn't receive my merit badge, and that doesn't mean any human decency rules were broken. Having code in the kernel is not that big a deal. I highly doubt I got any job offers because of it. This seems as Internet-pointy as HN karma.

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