[haswell]

> If you walked into a company unannounced and started doing work no one asked you to do (which is a far more accurate analogy)…

This is not analogous at all. The very premise of open source involves contribution from a community of volunteers. Contributing code to a project that accepts contributions from the public is the way things are expected to work, and is about as far removed as it can possibly be from showing up at a company unannounced and expecting to receive pay.

People contribute to these projects for a variety of reasons, but at the base of it all, it’s a very human endeavor, and in lieu of receiving monetary payment for productive work, proper attribution for contributors is about as low of a bar as one can set, and should be the minimum standard.

If the “kernel contributor” badge conveys something more than the maintainers are willing to convey about a contribution, there should be something that does.

[jacquesm]

That's a good point. Patch contributor would be a nice starterpoint I think, but it smacks of 'GitHub badges'. Note that if you create a metric like that it will for sure be gamed.