I imagine that there are a lot of opinions on the subject of accredation of development efforts. Now I dont mean in the legalistic sense but in the informal sense of within a development effort, open source or not. When do you put your name on stuff? If you patch a module do you add your name to the patch? When you rewrite the code of an earlier author, do you give them credit for the original work? If its a total rewrite do you mention the original still? Under what circumstances is it ok to remove accredation? Are these rules different depending on where you are working?

This subject originally arose because I was working on a pmdev patch that involved some cleanup, and was chattering with theorbtwo and observed that I had noticed the node I was patching had been signed, and that I had not removed the signature because I felt that would have been wrong, but that at the same time I would not be signing the patch as I didnt felt my changes deserved it. However this had made me think about the subject in whole, as I have signed at least one contribution (a new code node) that I had made.

Im curious how people out there see things like this? I remember one of my colleagues used to become very upset because his signature was removed from a bunch of code by a colleague during a code cleanup and refactoring, so I know the subject can draw stong feelings. Artists and authors have always claimed the right to sign their work, my feelings generally say this is true for programmers as well. Do you agree?