As a maintainer of small projects, I love when people contribute code or tests. I try to help them get the code in a good place with regards with the rest of the code base (this is the hardest part, as most developers do not follow project conventions as they just want to push the fix without first having to learn about that), but will accept patches as soon as I see that the code is approximately right and just needs another 15 minutes of my time after merging to "polish" it up and perhaps add a few more tests and things like that... I think that was the case here, and the maintainer should've done that. The person would get the credit, the maintainer would just spend a few minutes doing the necessary clean ups to get it accepted upstream, everyone would be happy. Saying "my version is better" is extremely obnoxious behaviour and unprofessional, regardless of whether it's actually better. If you haven't fixed the issue in 6 years since it was first reported, you should admit that without the person's contribution there just wouldn't be a fix by you, so taking the fix once you've been shown "a solution" is really kind of stealing.