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Re: Nicks, anonymity and pseudonymity [was: Re: Bug#296369]



On Sat, Feb 26, 2005 at 01:00:57PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 06:00:06 +0000 Andrew Suffield wrote:
> 
> > People who are not operating under their real identity *cannot* be
> > trusted because there can be no penalty for breach of trust, it's that
> > simple.
> 
> Well, trust and respect can grow for a fake identity (nick or nym), if
> this fake identity is used consistently in time.

It shouldn't. At any point they could suddenly go insane; there's
nothing to discourage them, as they can simply switch to a different
throwaway identity.

> > So while you can participate in this manner, you'll always be
> > an outsider. Anything that you say or do will not be taken at face
> > value, it will be scrutinised and double-checked.
> 
> I thought that reasonable care was spent to scrutinise anything being
> said by anyone, here.

I generally assume that -legal regulars repost licenses correctly,
don't mangle stuff when copying it from webpages, etc. With anonymous
users you can't.

> > The impact this has on free software development should be obvious.
> 
> Well, if you mean that anonymous and pseudonymous contributions are more
> difficult to handle copyright-wise, it's true.
> But, for instance, would you treat a (reproducible) bug report by an
> anonymous sender as less valuable?

I would treat a patch by an anonymous sender as less valuable. It
requires considerable scrutiny, because there's a good chance it
contains an exploit. With a patch from a person with a known identity,
there's not much chance of it being malicious.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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