[bigiain]

Interestingly (to me at least), I was just reading he memcached website (from another HN submission), and even though it's been completely rewritten in a different language, they still credit Brad Fitzpatrick as the original author.

No reason not to. Anyone arguing otherwise is being petty and mean in my opinion. Sure, a bunch of new people have written some/most/all of the current codebase. But they built on top of the project founder's code. Why _wouldn't_ you give them the credit for that?

[VBprogrammer]

This strikes me as a very old question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

In this specific case there seems to be no argument that the original author is who he says he is and he has given specific reasons why it would be in his advantage to be credited as the original author I can't imagine many people denying him that.

[SamBam]

Ship of Theseus is a great argument for crediting the original author, even if it's been 100% re-written over time: The ship would have started from one (or more) expert ship builders, while the continual patching could be done by comparatively-unskilled hands.

(Not that this is the case in software, but merely saying that that parable would lend itself to an easy answer as to whether to credit the original or not.)

[VBprogrammer]

You could equally argue that Gail's law is applicable. Without someone creating something simple but working it may never have existed.

[benji-york]

I suspect you mean "Gall's Law" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law).

[Anthony-G]

Thanks for the link. I hadn’t ever heard of the Ship of Theseus – though I’ve referred to Trigger’s Broom from Only Fools and Horses when discussing this concept with others: the character worked as a street-sweeper and claimed to have had the same broom for the past 20 years (however, he had changed both the handle and the head multiple times during this time).

[selexin]

Yeh I agree with this. Licensing and possible legalities aside, I think it’s just the right thing to do.

The issue seems to be getting a bit of attention now (when I posted there was 9 thumbs up, now there is 173 and a PR on the readme), so hopefully the current maintainers (re)visit the issue and give him his slice of credit.

[gsemet]

I actually not seen the issue opened 2 months ago :( I do not have many times on it and I read around half of tickets people opens, sadly this one did not :(

[spzb]

It's been done now

[evmar]

My recollection is that the original prototype was written in Perl, but the oldest commit on github[1] is in C, which is still the language it uses today. The original C version had big contributions from someone other than Brad starting from the third commit (search the git commit log for 'avva'). Definitely still Brad's baby though.

(Disclaimer: I was an early, minor, contributor. It looks like the second commit mentioning me was to fix a bug introduced by my first one, whoops.)

[1] https://github.com/memcached/memcached/tree/32f382b605b4565b...

[Cthulhu_]

One reason I can think of: Egos. "Why should this guy get credit after having left the project years ago while I still work full-time on it and all I get is an entry in a generated contributors file? No fair!"

I mean the OP (Gabriel) hints at wanting to use it in his CV (proverbially); wouldn't anyone that made a significant contribution? Then of course, how would you define significant?

It's a can of worms and one of the ways around it is to reduce all contributors to "you are not special" status.

[JangoSteve]

To be fair though, that's kind of life. The originators of any given thing always get remembered as the originators, despite how long they worked on it compared to anyone else since. This isn't just code. I mean, 30 years from now, George Lucas will still be remembered as the creator of Star Wars, even though by then I'm sure the writers at Disney will have produced 20x more stories around it, and Stan Lee/Jack Kirby will still be remembered as the creators of the characters others have already built upon and adapted since then. Even the USA has had far more people build and mold the country into what it is since the founding fathers. It's just one of the hallmarks of our society I think to romanticize and glorify the original creators of works.

I think reducing everyone to "you are not special" status is a pretty weak solution that probably wrongs more people than it rights. And I think egos are a pretty weak reason to do it.

[rdc12]

Brad Fitzpatrick is a pretty high profile programmer, would be extra crazy to remove his name.