Well, we're going to have to differ on that then. Michael - in my opinion - properly credited the OP for his contribution, he could have done a longer back and forth to coach the OP to present the 'perfect patch' but this is the wrong venue for that.

Besides that the OP misrepresented the interaction to a degree that he loses my sympathy, he makes the maintainer come off like a dick when in fact that wasn't the case at all, the interchange was polite and to the point and exactly in line with what I'd expect from a kernel maintainer.

You are way off base here. Notably you’re not a kernel maintainer (at least I sure hope not) and you don’t speak for them. Furthermore I have no idea what you mean by “unsolicited patch”. The whole project solicits patches from anybody and everybody by having open issue trackers and source trees and mailing lists. Who the fuck are you to act like an entitled gatekeeper and disregard Ariel’s work just because he wasn’t familiar with needing a signed off by line. Maybe Ariel was just preliminarily submitting the patch for discussion and was planning ti address comments and sign off on the patch once they confirmed with a maintainer that everything looked good?

> To me there's a difference between having a commit bit ("kernel contributor status") and having a contribution that was accepted into the kernel.

Who do you think has the commit bit on the Linux repo? Hint: kernel contributors don't.