How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
ariel-miculas.github.io
Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control the debug session anymore. Multiple people have already investigated this problem and I had a good starting point, but we still weren’t sure in which software component the issue lied: it could have been the toolchain, the gdbserver, the Linux kernel or the custom patches we applied on top of the kernel tree. We were quite far away from finding the root cause.
    • Platypus
      4•1 year ago

      The maintainer also comes off as a colossal asshole about the whole thing who didn’t even deign to offer a scrap of credit to the programmer who found and fixed a six-year-old bug. If the article is truthful, the maintainer is the sort of toxic, power-tripping, self-obsessed repo czar that actively makes the open source community worse.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        Being a maintainer is often a thankless, unpaid, never ending job. I will always give maintainers the benefit of the doubt, especially when they are being active, and not leaving gaps.

        Regardless of how this contributer wants to be acknowledged for a drive by contribution, Im sure they will keep developing and build a name for themselves so that a single patch isn’t a huge issue

      • @czech
        1•1 year ago

        The quote in the article is not what the maintainer actually wrote. What they wrote was:

        Thanks for your patch, but I wanted to fix it differently. Can you try the patch below and make sure it fixes the bug for you?

        Seems they should have attributed correctly but they weren’t as dismissive as the blog makes it seem.