Re: [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: allow non-real name contributions

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 09, 2025 at 10:42:58PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
>
>> On 2025-07-08 at 22:51:34, Jeff King wrote:
>> > Yeah, I agree (and didn't know that before; thanks for mentioning). I
>> > think mostly I was just hoping that some of this reasoning and these
>> > pointers would make it into the commit message.
>> > 
>> > The content of the patch looked OK to me, though I do still like the
>> > CNCF wording a bit better.
>> 
>> In case it isn't clear, I'll be sending a v2, probably this weekend with
>> more of this information and some updated wording.
>> 
>> I don't love the CNCF wording because I feel it's too ambiguously
>> worded.  What is the "community"?  The open-source community?  My
>> neighbourhood?  My friend group?  Can a real name be a username or
>> handle that's distinct and unambiguous?  What about communities where
>> people share the same name?  (Debian has, or at least had, two
>> contributors who both have the exact same full legal name and can
>> therefore only be distinguished by handle.)
>> 
>> I also think redefining "real name" in that way is misleading and leads
>> to confusion that might put people off, especially those that are not
>> native English speakers.  I know it's common for lawyers to redefine
>> language to mean something very precise but different from the language
>> that ordinary humans use[0], but that's ultimately dishonest and tends
>> to deceive and we shouldn't do it.  Most people take the phrase "real
>> name" to mean something equivalent to "legal name", so we should use
>> language to describe the requirement that doesn't confuse or mislead
>> people when it's used without further context (such as in a social media
>> post).
>
> Fair points. I think what I liked about it is that it emphasized the
> purpose of the policy:
>
>   The key concern is that your identification is sufficient enough to
>   contact you if an issue were to arise in the future about your
>   contribution.
>
> I also liked the sentence before:
>
>   Your real name is the name you convey to people in the community for
>   them to use to identify you as you.
>
> but I agree that "community" is vague there. I think it mostly means
> "the development community", but I agree that we could perhaps sidestep
> the whole issue by just saying we need some way to be able to identify
> and get in touch with you.
>
>> I'll take some inspiration from the CNCF post and rephrase to make it
>> more approachable in v2.
>
> Great, thank you.

Sounds good.  Thanks, both of you.