Hi all ,
thank you MSavoritias for bringing up points that many of us share. It's
clearly a tradeoff what to do about the past. For the future, as
Christpher already stated, we need a serious solution that we can uphold
as a free software project that does not alienate users or contributors.
My opinion is that names are just wrong to be included, not only because
of deadnames, but in general having a database with a column first_name
and a column second_name is something only a 35 yrs old white cis boy
could have thought was a good idea to model the spectrum of names humans
use all over the world:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240317114846/https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
If we'd really need to identify contributors, and obviously Guix
doesn't, we could use an UUID/machine readable identifier which can then
be mapped to a displayed name. I believe git can already be configured
to do so.
giacomo
