On the other hand, if you get someone else to commit on a project you start, people will think of you when they think of the project. Case in point: until I looked at the history in-depth I always thought of pengwynn when I looked at this project:

https://github.com/pengwynn/faraday_middleware

The vast majority of commits are by https://github.com/sferik though.

I don't think pengwynn is gaming the system, but if someone wanted to, this is how they could do it.