You're making some poor comparisons to justify how things were done in this instance. What actually happened here is someone encountered a bug, they diagnosed t

You're making some poor comparisons to justify how things were done in this instance. What actually happened here is someone encountered a bug, they diagnosed the bug, they fixed the bug, they brought the bug up on a mailing list, they updated their fix, they submitted their fix. The maintainer changed 1 line of their fix from an #ifdef to a macro that has the same ultimate effect and then stuck their name on the fix. Beyond the morality of doing this, there is a practical consideration of copyright issues. OP did that as part of his job. OP and his employer have some sort of agreement of ownership of these 30 lines of code and the maintainer putting his name on it and putting it into the kernel could someday be a problem.