On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:10:21 +1100, Darren Gansberg wrote: > Henri Beauchamp wrote: > > > > Because you can actually know who are *all* the real persons behind *any* > > Open Source project ?... You know, people do use pseudonyms a lot, on > > Internet... Anyway, no where in the GPL will you find that a developper > > *must* disclose their true identity > > No of course you can't. Additionally the developer shouldn't be forced > to disclose their identity. What i was taking exception with was the > view that the identity of the developer is no one's business. As i said > it's the users business. But the appropriate solution to the user not > knowing the identity of the person responsible for writing a piece of > code is for the user not to install and use that program on their system > if they arent comfortable of knowing its source.
Knowing the source doesn't mean knowing the real person. Even an avatar got a reputation, which is directly linked to the nature of the true person behind it: users will know that this or that avatar have a good reputaion or not, and can be trusted or not, based on what their player already did under this avatar's name. Anyway, knowing the real name of a source won't give you more guarantee about this person's "trustability". With Open Source software, the guarantee comes from the fact the sources are published (making it it possible to spot malicious code), and that you can also verify (by rebuilding the porject yourself from those sources) that no additional, secret/malevolent code was inserted in the published binaries. > That said i don't think it's necessarily a great attitude to take that > your not prepared to put your identity to your own doings. And i adopt > that view to all manner of things software development aside. Even novel writers often use pseudonyms... The problem is not about not being "prepared to put your identity to your own doings", it's all about the cross referencing that search engines such as Google allow: if I put my true name behind the Cool SL Viewer, then it also means that anyone Googling that true name could find out what are my kinks (profiles are also Googled), then who I am in Real Life, what's my job, where I live, etc, etc... Would *you* be ready for this to happen to *you* ? I'm not ! Henri. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
