Partner works. There are many different types of partners, like business partner, gaming partner, conversational partner, romantic partner, and sexual partner (with some possible overlaps of course)

I seem to remember them saying 10 was going to be the last one, too

To me the credit thing is less about “oh they made it so they deserve the credit”, and more about spreading word about the free software movement. Software freedom is good, and GNU is all about software freedom, but people won’t find that by searching for “Linux”