Re: Aw: Re: Unit 193: Declaration of intent
Russell Stuart <russell-debian@stuart.id.au> writes:
> Which brings me to my final point - openness and transparency is a core
> Debian value. We believe the world is a better place when sunlight
> shines on all the dark corners, leaving selfish and malignant behaviour
> no place to hide. This comes at a cost, often a personal cost as our
> mistakes are laid bare for all to see. The core value is we are willing
> to pay that cost. And surely that includes cost of occasionally not
> admitting someone who really belongs here.
> That said, if they do belong here they should share this core value.
> Insisting they personally must remain anonymous isn't a good way of
> demonstrating it.
I agree that we would not want to accept anonymous contributors. However,
Unit 193 is clearly not anonymous, so I'm not sure what that has to do
with this thread.
I know many people who are widely known under names other than what
appears on their birth certificate or other government papers. It is, for
example, very common for transgender people, since often changing those
government papers is quite difficult or involves confrontations that are
not safe for them. There are also some countries that have very specific
policies on names and do not allow official name changes.
The reasons, at least IMO, why we don't want anonymous contributors is
because we want continuity (the person I'm interacting with is the same
person I was previously interacting with, and the same person who has
established trust within our community) and accountability (if someone
does something, that continues to be attributable to them even if they'd
rather it not, so that people cannot take malicious or questionable
actions and then pretend they never did them). Both of those reasons are
entirely consistent with using a persistent identity that is unrelated to
one's government papers.
The one situation in which we need some sort of link is if the project
might need to take legal action against someone who has violated our trust
in some very serious way. Because of that, I believe (from a previous
round of this discussion) we have a process for holding that link in
confidence so that we can use it if we absolutely have to, without making
it public.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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