If you invent something, but you do not share it with the general public, and a group of other people invent an equivalent, then who was first to invent? Who is

If you invent something, but you do not share it with the general public, and a group of other people invent an equivalent, then who was first to invent? Who is going to have the credit? I'd say it is akin to a proprietary technology which never got released to the general public, and then some FOSS technology comes along which does arguably the same, yet is FOSS and gets widely adopted. Want the credit? Should've released it to the public then. That's a side effect of working for secret services; you don't get much, if any, personal credit. Nor even credit as a secret service. E.g. because the ops remain secret.