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Skin in the Game

lucumr.pocoo.org

51–60 of 70 posts

Re: Skin in the Game

#51
post #50

> Skin in the game In the title but never elaborated on. (Kind of like CDO.[1]) Anyone who makes an effort has skin in the game. Unless your PR was made by ChatGPT or you are sending out spam PRs, you have skin in the game. (Of course there’s an asymmetry here since the maintainer has to deal with this spam. But isn’t it like email? Eventually with enough spam it will be tolerated to by-default ignore solicitations b…

Most open source projects have not just the final source published, but also all communication for patches, features and their relevant discussion. That could be on GitHub, a traditional mailing list, or some other hosting platform. You can’t tell in advance how your work will be received, but you can empirically tell how others work has been received. And even compare the communication styles. And it’s not rocket sc…

> And it’s not rocket science that well reasoned patches, with tests, splitting out separate commits, explaining the reason for the change would be better received than a typo laden one-liner, “I needz it”.

I said makes an effort.

You can implement a novel feature (and well) and get it rejected.

Re: Skin in the Game

#52
post #4

TIL that untypical is a word that means the same as atypical. It's funny. I think of anonymity as something that has been part of the Internet going back through at least the last three decades of my experience with it. Back in the day you had anonymous retailers, let alone people using pseudonyms. It was very much part of the fabric. If anything, it feels like anonymity on the Internet is harder to achieve these day…

I think the internet always had anonymity. I do think it was easier to be anonymous on the surface but at the same time there were so many fewer people on the internet that it wasn't that hard to uncover the person behind the curtain. I do however think that this is unrelated to the Open Source angle. You will still find this sentence on Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker" guide which in some ways shows how mu…

yea, nobody at the time bought it either.

Re: Skin in the Game

#53

Anonymity is a many-faceted issue. I have various personas on the Internet, but the truth is that any serious research can probably link them together. Why do most people want anonymity (or pseudonymity)? Most of us are not in any sort of actual danger. If someone links my identities together, nothing horrible is going to happen. At worst, my employer will get some nasty email by someone I offended with an uncareful…

In my case is: Having anonymous accounts give me “freedom of erasure”. So, if I want to quit platform Z, for me it’s as easy as doing nothing: I don’t mind the (anon) posts I wrote, I don’t mind the email I signed up with (used exclusively for anon purposes); all that stuff is not linked to me, so I don’t mind what happens with it. On the other side, if all that stuff is linked to my name, I need to care of making sure it gets deleted by platform Z and all the other places where the stuff has been replicated (which is almost impossible nowadays).

I dont want people to know what I wrote 15 years ago in some place of the internet. That’s not me anymore.

Re: Skin in the Game

#54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most open source projects have not just the final source published, but also all communication for patches, features and their relevant discussion. That could be on GitHub, a traditional mailing list, or some other hosting platform. You can’t tell in advance how your work will be received, but you can empirically tell how others work has been received. And even compare the communication styles. And it’s not rocket sc…

> And it’s not rocket science that well reasoned patches, with tests, splitting out separate commits, explaining the reason for the change would be better received than a typo laden one-liner, “I needz it”. I said makes an effort. You can implement a novel feature (and well) and get it rejected.

I’m saying without writing any code I can already tell, within a reasonable level of confidence, if a patch would be accepted by looking through past contributions. You’re not working in a vacuum.

Re: Skin in the Game

#55
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what difference does that make - Really?

it increases the cost for the attacker, forging ID is expensive and against the law. It also leaves behind additional evidence that might be useful to investigators

The attacker wasn’t a random kid having fun. If they have the resources to do this kind of attack, they can definitely forge IDs.

Re: Skin in the Game

#56
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should speak more about those consequences you’re afraid of? Take the xz incident from this weekend. No one is crucifying the maintainer who gave Jia Tan commiter rights. No one is prosecuting or persecuting them. Everyone understands that they were under stress. I’m yet to see a single negative thing even been written about them. The legal consequences you fear feel more imagined than real. As long as yo…

> Perhaps you should speak more about those consequences you’re afraid of? I'm not particular fearful of anything. It's an observation of a cultural change that I perceive. I'm facing many more interactions with throwaway accounts, individuals that have no desire to establish a reputation etc. It changes the way you communicate in subtle ways, there is less of a believe that you will run into some of those folks at c…

> many of those things were outright obvious malice

Yeah, exactly what I'm saying. As long as you put software out there in good faith, you won't be convicted of wire fraud. So just ... don't be malicious I guess? That seems like a low bar that all of us can clear.

> While it was once much more commonplace ... to vet licenses

I don't know why we need to vet licenses? We've mostly come to a consensus. Most software is either MIT/Apache (anything goes), GPL (release your modified source as GPL) or some weird license masquerading as open source (hi Mongo and redis). We don't need more innovation in this space, we need less. And there's not much to discuss when almost all software is one of the first three licenses.

> legal underpinnings are largely what enables Open Source

I'd argue that if Open Source is continuing to be developed despite us not verifying identities, maybe it isn't necessary anymore? Maybe it was just something we did back in the day, but we don't need to anymore because the landscape has changed. It's possible what we actually needed was authentication - that this PR is actually coming from Armin and not someone masquerading as him. And Github provides that with its username, password and 2FA.

As long as there's no account level hacking involved and I know the person who submitted this change is the same the one I think they are, that gives me a lot of confidence. At that point it doesn't matter if the change came from Armin (who I've never had the pleasure of meeting), or Asahi Lina (who I never will meet).

Re: Skin in the Game

#58
Since the times have changed and it's acceptable for people on the internet to be angry at anybody for anything, no wonder less and less people are willing to risk their physical identity or even online pseudonymous identity.

Re: Skin in the Game

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the internet always had anonymity. I do think it was easier to be anonymous on the surface but at the same time there were so many fewer people on the internet that it wasn't that hard to uncover the person behind the curtain. I do however think that this is unrelated to the Open Source angle. You will still find this sentence on Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker" guide which in some ways shows how mu…

yea, nobody at the time bought it either.

I disagree on the “nobody”. A lot of people did function that way as evidenced by a long history of contributions to open source projects. Certainly the folks that brought me to Open Source had no quarrels with having their real identity associated and definitely neither did I.

Re: Skin in the Game

#60
post #53

Anonymity is a many-faceted issue. I have various personas on the Internet, but the truth is that any serious research can probably link them together. Why do most people want anonymity (or pseudonymity)? Most of us are not in any sort of actual danger. If someone links my identities together, nothing horrible is going to happen. At worst, my employer will get some nasty email by someone I offended with an uncareful…

In my case is: Having anonymous accounts give me “freedom of erasure”. So, if I want to quit platform Z, for me it’s as easy as doing nothing: I don’t mind the (anon) posts I wrote, I don’t mind the email I signed up with (used exclusively for anon purposes); all that stuff is not linked to me, so I don’t mind what happens with it. On the other side, if all that stuff is linked to my name, I need to care of making su…

> I dont want people to know what I wrote 15 years ago in some place of the internet. That’s not me anymore.

Did you always feel like that or is that something that came out of the experience of what people do with that information?

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