Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

“The thief”: When your approach to open source is that you close pull requests and merge the diff manually under your own name.

So many large corporate-run projects do this and, while I’m sure there are some compliance reasons, it just looks dodgy.



> So many large corporate-run projects do this ...

Ouch, that's pretty bad. Any stand out projects doing this that you'd care to mention?


https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/2292#issuec... became https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/commit/125a81f2e... for some inexplicable reason. Now it looks like droidmonkey authored that entire feature. I did see the "squashed commits" and "taken under my wing" part but it appears it was a `git add .` and not a `git rebase` type operation that would have preserved the original author separate from the committer

I mean in the end I'm not jammed up about it because my objective was to contribute back the local patches I made to scratch my itch, but it means I have to remember the PR number because that's the only evidence of my authorship


duosecurity/duo_universal_php did this with my PR.


Interesting. That doesn't seem like a complete clear cut case of it though, more the git-fu of the repo maintainer there might not be all that great. :(

Saying that from looking at your PR:

https://github.com/duosecurity/duo_universal_php/pull/7

Then looking at the commit which eventually got into their repo:

https://github.com/duosecurity/duo_universal_php/commit/c69e...

Even though they fucked up the author name on the commit itself, they at least attempted to credit you in the commit title:

    Merge PR 7 from theodorejb; Add missing type declarations and fix incorrect PHPDoc types
While that's not fantastic as it screws up proper attribution with pretty much every automated git tool... it doesn't seem like a case of them trying to claim credit for someone else's work.

That's just my impression anyway. Could be wrong. :D




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: