50
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.
I think they did. Apparently the maintainer trusted the first-time contributor enough to propose tackling another bug.
If the goal is to get more contributions, I think that’s exactly what should happen. I feel the kernel maintainer is being treated unfairly.
Whining about getting extra work feels like the author didn’t intended to contribute anything else and just put all this reputation chips on that one isolated ticket.
There is no trust needed when asking someone to fix a bug. It’s not like the maintainer would lose anything if the contributor failed to fix the bug.
Besides, I think it is natural to want recognition when you do a lot of work for free. Many other people wouldn’t do this unpaid work at all; recognizing their contribution is the bare minimum of good manners. Even in a company where employees are paid for their work, it is customary to give credit to co-workers who have helped you. Most people don’t like to work in places where they don’t feel appreciated, and that is also true in Open-Source.