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Comment by JokerDan | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand the toxicity here.. People saying that 'you shouldn't do things just for recognition/gold starts/reward/cv/etc are insane to me?

Do they have jobs? If so, to make these kinds of comments imo they should be working completely for free. Salary is a form of recognition for contribution.

Personally, adding a co-author (even if the final solution ends up different to the one proposed, but the solution is based around the findings of the original solution) is such a tiny thing to do. I think the author has a valid point to moan about this.. it isn't the first and won't be the last instance of somebody feeling their contribution to something is going unrecognised.

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> I really don't understand the toxicity here.. People saying that 'you shouldn't do things just for recognition/gold starts/reward/cv/etc are insane to me?

people are acting like we are code robots who never want recognition for a job well done. even if the patch itself was inferior, the debugging effort certainly was not

"Perhaps then we should make all contributions anonymized, so that we can ensure people are contributing for what we think are the "right" reasons".

> to make these kinds of comments imo they should be working completely for free. Salary is a form of recognition for contribution.

No, that’s a different scenario. Where employment is concerned, the employer and employee have an agreement where work is performed in exchange for compensation.

If you walked into a company unannounced and started doing work no one asked you to do (which is a far more accurate analogy to what happened to the OP), very few people would argue you’re entitled to compensation.

You will likely find though that someone will say "thanks for the work you've helped us with"

I find the blog post a little in bad taste, but sometimes you need to stir things to get meaningful change.

How many other first time contributors has this exact thing happened to who now will never contribute again but didn't speak up?

> If you walked into a company unannounced and started doing work no one asked you to do (which is a far more accurate analogy)…

This is not analogous at all. The very premise of open source involves contribution from a community of volunteers. Contributing code to a project that accepts contributions from the public is the way things are expected to work, and is about as far removed as it can possibly be from showing up at a company unannounced and expecting to receive pay.

People contribute to these projects for a variety of reasons, but at the base of it all, it’s a very human endeavor, and in lieu of receiving monetary payment for productive work, proper attribution for contributors is about as low of a bar as one can set, and should be the minimum standard.

If the “kernel contributor” badge conveys something more than the maintainers are willing to convey about a contribution, there should be something that does.

That's a good point. Patch contributor would be a nice starterpoint I think, but it smacks of 'GitHub badges'. Note that if you create a metric like that it will for sure be gamed.

I would say even “recognizing original author and presenting yourself as an editor” would be even more fair.

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