Its also worth noting that the idea of having a single, fixed legal name is in no way a universal. There are many countries which do not require this and in which people do not have a legal name. Perhaps you've heard of some of them, such as the United Kingdom. Yes, English people do have names on their passports, but its trivially easy to change is often not the only name they use in official contexts.
Whereas Dutch people literally require permission from the king of the Netherlands to change their names.
These vastly different structures in essentially neighbouring countries shows that the governance of names is highly arbitrary. Needless to say, this has no positive impact on code quality whereas permanently expelling trans contributors who come from oppressive regimes will certainly not improve your Foss product.
Edit: Even California allows people to establish names just by using them.
@drewdevault Our (@pidgin) contributor list contains a mix of real names, online handles, companies (alive and dead).. In other words, we don't care how you want to be credited, but for purposes of copyright, we have to call you something ;)
That said, I'd still really like a version control system that'd move author names/email to an identifier or something that can be modified after the fact. That'd fix dead names, typos, lots of "admin"'s and other issues that can't be solved by a mailfilter
@drewdevault All my names are real.
Do you mean government ID name?
How would you plan on enforcing it? have a database of PII?
What problem does it solve? Isn't linking back to some soft of identity provider better? (i.e. email, or github account)
@drewdevault others have already linked the resources we'd recommend
we hope and expect that the trans community will at some point start boycotting projects with these policies en masse. we know quite a few people who've been doing it at a personal level. we've cancelled some planned work we were hoping to get to because we found out the project has a "real name" policy.
@drewdevault I don't understand the discussion. As there are people with different real names depending on which branch of government you ask a policy like that is just fundamentally broken as a starting point. So we don't need to get into why it's a bad idea even if it was technically possible, it isn't and there is nothing to discuss.
@drewdevault Not directly on point, but related: At my first job there was somebody all over the commit history I assumed was a former employee. I eventually learned the username was the maiden name of somebody who had gotten married recently. Thus, the way IT assigned usernames using last name systematically caused underestimation of women's contributions.
@drewdevault I long ago decided that I didn't care about username nonsense and would just use my name online everywhere. It's worked fine for me, but I didn't consider that this doesn't work out for women who are going to marry and still want to retain a public reputation.
@drewdevault That said, if you're a company relying on work licensed by a hundred copyright owners who did not contribute under a work for hire situation, I can see cause for anxiety and a desire to at least make some visible attempt to map handles to identity in a way, however imperfect it may be, that is legible to a court of law.
@drewdevault Nerds have a funny way of believing that since legal systems are stupid, we won't have to answer to them. "Nothing has been cryptographically proven!" okay but I can tell the lawyers I made a good faith effort
@drewdevault What bothers me most about real name policies is not only does it alienate people who would rather keep their identity private, it also opens up contributors to abuse that is worse than what is already possible. Your work might be denied because your gender identity does not fit the gender that traditionally matches your legal name. Use signed commits if you want to confirm someone's identity, it's more secure anyway.
@drewdevault other than the obvious problems with "real name" policies, I think another angle worth looking at is that there's a long tradition of pseudonymous and anonymous publications. The right to publish a work "under a real name, pseudonym, or anonymously" is even embedded in copyright laws of many countries, and in the Berne Convention.
And while that law doesn't require a project to accept pseudo/anonymous contributions, I think it's a good thing to strive for, as much as practical.
@drewdevault the “real name” is the one the contributor chooses to (commonly?) use. Authors have pen names, trans people have deadnames, we don’t expect either of those groups to justify their choices beyond “because I wanted to”. If Mudge could appear as such in front of the US Congress, I think the rest of us will be fine!
@drewdevault Problematic. One of many reasons: "real" is ambiguous. Real as in legal? Real as in most often used? Real as in preferred identity? What if these are all different? What if someone does not want their contributions (openly) linked to their legal identity?
You'll just have to get over the fact that some weird nick-names will be in your copyright headers, which seems odd at first considering the context of a legal technicality, but really doesn't matter in the end IMO.
@drewdevault Personally don't have a huge issue with it because my real name is already out there and easy to link to my online identity, but I'm very aware that others go to great lengths to separate those two (and I'm passively to do the same). These people are really smart and have good ideas, so gating them from contributing because they don't want to link their real identity to their online one is a delightfully petty thing to do. I /do/ understand the want to be able to link a contributor to some existing reputation, but I don't believe a "real name" is required for that if they're only known by their handle anyways.
Also you should be able to review code separate from someone's reputation, since someone might not actually have any in the first place and they're trying to build it up.
@drewdevault Won't contribute any potential patches I have upstream. Sure real name policies make sense for stuff that is a bit more risky from a legal POV (Like Wine or ReactOS or reverse engineering stuff), but for normal projects? - Nope. Under no circumstances I would contribute to a project requiring my real name
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