Credit everyone by name or credit no one by name. It is inherently unfair to only credit key talent.

At least part of the reason not to credit individual engineers is that it damages the myth of the genius CEO. Ask most people who invented the iphone, they will not say "it was the work of hundreds of people at a dozen companies inside and outside Apple", they'll say "Steve Jobs".

That is different though. Steve Jobs never claimed credit himself. As a matter of fact his autograph are extremely rare;

"Steve politely declined several times, stating that everything at Apple was a group effort, so he didn’t like to sign and take credit for everything. " [1]

And with every Keynote Steve will thank all teams who has been working nights and days, often using the phase "separated from their families". And constant and consistently reminding everyone that "We, at Apple." Not "Me, Steve Jobs".

I remember some made the observation Elon Musk is more about selling himself than Tesla or SpaceX. Steve Jobs is more about selling Apple himself.

But at the same time let's admit it, Apple without Steve Jobs is just different. There is no one to keep the balance between everyone. Jony, Eddy, Tim, Phill, Scott Forstall and lots of others. Steve often likes to refer Apple as the Beatles, where the whole is greater than sum of its parts, and they kept everyone's flaws in check.

[1] https://live.autographmagazine.com/profiles/blogs/steve-jobs...

It's also incredibly unfair to credit people not really related to the actual product. Should the names of all the employees of some bookstore in Wyoming be in the credits for Harry Potter books?

The credits for God of War PS4 were 28 minutes long listing pretty much every employ of Sony in all countries down to caterers.

Personally I find that insulting and unfair to the actual creative team that made the game.

Which is why credit appearance order and grouping is such a big deal and part of contract negotiation in films. Earlier appearances is supposed to signify importance (notice when a group of names isn't alphabetical), along with pre-title and marketing materials credits and the slideshow credits separate from the rolling credits.

Isn't the moral right of every (software) author that his name is mentioned next to the authored intellectual property (software)? This is even written in copyright laws of some countries...

Unless as part of your employment, you agreed to an implicit copyright reassignment to the organization. In that instance, a “(c) Alphabet ####” is allowed.

In countries that know true "Moral Rights", those rights are unassignable, so any such agreement is void. Your employer still gets all the money, but you get the "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" clout if you want it.

That's an excellent question. I believe non-visual moral rights are not recognized in the US, and I'm not sure they've ever been tested for software in any other Berne Convention signatories.

Video game studios routinely credit everyone, too. Though there's some politics involved (just like in movies) I won't get into.

Could it be... that crediting is part of the industry norms in one case, and not the other? Absolutely nothing to do with unions.

We've done a /humans.txt for this in a now dead project.

http://humanstxt.org

> The CEO banned them, saying it would be unfair to give credit to individuals instead of the whole company,

It sounds a lot less hypocritical this way.

To my knowledge, Pixar is non-union.

But they are still operating adjacent to a highly unionized industry, so parts of their products may have operated under union rules, and for others, they may have competed for employees that had a choice to work for unionized employers.