61–70 of 70 posts
> 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…
Many open source projects use the first one, the article advocates for the third one, but I personally find the second one least objectionable.
In the current culture, a "full real name" policy is almost unachievable because of the backlash from trans folks, who may not be able to change their legal name (this is very hard or even impossible in some countries), but yet don't want to see their old name on a daily basis. Whether you find the backslash to be entirely justified or caused by "woke people and their vile woke ways" is completely beside the point, the backlash will happen and you have to contend with it somehow. There are also bias-related implications here, if you're part of a minority that is often discriminated against, you may want to adopt a name that doesn't immediately give that fact away.
I think a good compromise here would be to introduce some kind of "verified" badge for Github accounts. This badge would only be given to people who pass an ID and liveness check, enable 2FA on their accounts, use an avatar of themselves or no avatar at all, indicate the country they live in on their profile (consistent with the country of issue of their document), and either use their real name or a name that is clearly a pseudonym. Repo owners could then limit contributions to such verified badge holders. Such a step shouldn't be taken lightly, this would massively limit the amount of contributions for such repos, particularly from "conscientious objectors" to GitHub's business practices, but would perhaps be a good choice for libraries requiring very little maintenance and with massive security implications.
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…
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> Since then I started working in open source companies that are operating on GitHub. An early meeting someone asked "who's this Demur Rumed making random pull requests?" sheepishly I declared myself, "Please update your profile with your real name I make a new GitHub account for any new job I start using my company email I never use my personal accounts for anything work related I once got a message from HR telling…
For open- or closed-source work? If I'm doing open source coding, whether professional or not, I'd always want that associated with my personal GH account.
* My employer has no say in my private account. They can't force my to change my private bio or profile name, for example
* It's clear which code I authored as a part of my employment and which I did on my own after hours (extremely important for me).
* I work in IT security do I should give an example :). Some projects my company hosts on GH are not public (yes), or some projects I have access to because of my work. I shouldn't touch them after I leave my current company, or access them from private devices.
> Maybe verified identities an illusion, but sometimes these illusions is all that's needed to feel more relaxed. Author almost realizes that they're asking for something that is at best a mirage and then bats away that thought[0]. But that's not something that you can casually dismiss near the end of your post, it's a crucial flaw in the whole idea! The comfort that you get from seeing "John Smith" as the contributo…
Author here. I’m not asking for anything in particular, I’m primarily writing about a shift in Open Source culture I have observed.
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Author here. I’m not asking for anything in particular, I’m primarily writing about a shift in Open Source culture I have observed.
I mean, maybe s/asking for/wishing for/g? but the summary of the post really reads to me as approximately "I really liked it better when contributors weren't anonymous". I grant that it reads as hedging a lot and acknowledging that that has problems, but it's not at all neutral overall.
I would love to know how the kernel and other projects approach this nowadays. Their contribution guides imply an abstract sense of identity but it doesn’t describe much what this entails.
Pseudonyms are fine, as long as each person has only one, and multiple alts are guaranteed to be extremely costly to create. People are primarily just afraid of being duped or tricked somehow by someone hiding behind multiple identities, otherwise they don’t treat pseudonyms much differently. Of course there’s a practical difficulty in making sure creating the first pseudonym identity has a low bar but also to make s…
> Pseudonyms are fine, as long as each person has only one, and multiple alts are guaranteed to be extremely costly to create. You’ve invented Real Identity #2. So now you have effectively two real identities, a step up from just one but you don’t have the pseudonym capability of reinventing yourself whenever you want.
It’s still better than the alternatives for those afraid of being tricked.
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I mean, maybe s/asking for/wishing for/g? but the summary of the post really reads to me as approximately "I really liked it better when contributors weren't anonymous". I grant that it reads as hedging a lot and acknowledging that that has problems, but it's not at all neutral overall.
I’m not sure myself. I think on the range of that I wish contributors were is some form of known identity but that doesn’t have to be specific form of one. Some form of social contract that when you contribute you are not someone who will disappear. However it looks like that’s something that not everyone subscribes to any more. I would love to know how the kernel and other projects approach this nowadays. Their cont…
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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.
specifically i was referring to the dropping of handles, not the association with real identities.