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:

quoted

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.

-Peff