Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[paul]

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