Managing expectations with a contributions and credit policy

Managing expectations with a contributions and credit policy

I wrote a long discussion of the subtleties of the "Co-authored-by:" tag but ended up cutting it.

Short version: "Co-authored-by:" is an important and critical tool for giving secondary credit. Most people use it to give credit to someone who wrote a small part of a larger contribution that can't be contributed separately and otherwise would not have gotten formal credit at all. But I've seen people who make a habit of slightly editing almost every PR, making themselves the primary author of the commit, and making it look less bad by booting the primary author to "Co-authored-by:". This is slightly better than maintainers who do this and demote the primary author to "Reported-by:" or "Signed-off-by:", but if it's being used as a plausibly deniable way to usurp credit, it's a net loss IMO.

The difference between primary author and co-author is important: most software, including git itself, chooses to display only the primary author. For example, some IDEs show the git primary author of each line; the co-author only shows up if you look at the entire log message. So a contributor spends 99% of their time seeing the primary author repeated hundreds of times and 1% seeing the co-author scroll by once. I know GitHub has some support for "Co-authored-by:" but it seems a little fiddly.

Another important point is that it's mostly only maintainers who have the power to do this: the contribution shows up with the correct primary author, the maintainer makes some easy changes, decides they deserve primary credit, changes the authorship, and check it in. A contributor can't do the same thing to a maintainer. So misuse of "Co-authored-by:" tends to be solely by maintainers or other gatekeepers, just like other forms of taking credit unfairly.

People will still argue about whether "Co-authored-by:" is significantly different than primary author, but watch what people do: most people prefer and will fight for credit as primary author.