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. -Peff
