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Comment by shortcake27 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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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