Blender’s a target for some potential copyright lawsuit. Honestly, I would provide my name out of courtesy.
It just depends what your priorities are. Do you want credit and recognition? A legal name and some email contact info isn’t an unreasonable thing to ask for. It is far less than what you are giving away by using a cell phone and paying for internet service. Those two things are actively selling everything they can to whoever will buy it from them. Safe to say that Blender is not interested in that, and isn’t asking for anything valuable in the first place.
Otherwise, I imagine you could have a ghost writer of sorts to submit your PR.
I also do not expect Blender to throw me under any legal busses if they ever accepted a PR I made, and then got sued by some clown. I can sleep soundly, and so can everybody else.
An email is sufficient for contacts. And lawsuits take place in courts, not in the cloud.
No. Not really.
I can buy a cell phone without giving up my name. And for the internet service… it’s not that the provider will paint my name on all the walls in the city.
Who can say what is considered valuable or not to any individual?
Ohh… I’ve seen developers copying code from others, and wearing their name in a tag. The real identity doens’t prevent any of that.
You can give them your name to submit a PR, or you can probably find a way around it. If you want recognition, just do what they ask. Otherwise, have someone else submit it for you. They aren’t posting your name unless you wanted it, but they do ask for it for their own records.
This is all in the context of everybody having their info out there, since way before anybody could have done anything to prevent it. If someone is legitimately off the grid, and cares to submit a PR to Blender, and has some reason to fear their identity leaking for whatever legal or personal reasons, I guess that comes with a little more effort now than before. I am pretty sure that person doesn’t exist.
I can see that for you this proposal is a no go. Concerning wide spreading of personal data: Based on the Information by Fransesco Siddi over at devtalk the data is kept private and the relevant laws are respected for the data collection.
I belief this will include the european general data protection regulation which sets a high standard for the data collection, data processing, user rights and data transmission/spreading.
That has always been the case and it will most likely always be the case.
Of course.
Personally, I would prefer if this wasn’t necessary. It would be interesting to hear from lawyers as to why they think this is useful.
Every open source project which allows contributions is essentially global and to a certain degree, all the existing laws need to be considered. From the get go, I assume this is a very difficult legal topic. At the very least, I am not surprised that layers think this kind of measure makes sense.
If we are talking about the code commits (which are revised and discussed prior to acceptance), yes, there are laws about it.
What I don’t see as a necessity, is to have a parallel legal document (when the code already has the required legal announcements); specially one where a real identity is required.
if at least I’d get a 50% tax reduction for contributing free for the mankind…
This isn’t “just meaningless legalese.” It’s actually very important in a world where such a now-influential and successful open-source project could easily become a legal target. The Foundation has to be able to establish “the provenance” of the contributions, in order to successfully defend against “lawyers.” Who would otherwise suck-up money simply because they know they can.
You wish to make a contribution. “Who, and where, are you?” That’s actually not too much to ask. Otherwise, “some lawyer” is going to make an outlandish (and expensive) statement, calculating that “you can’t prove otherwise.” The threat is real.
It’s not quite that simple. There has been no explanation about how this could protect against legal threats, despite multiple people asking. Not to mention, several scenarios have been outlined showing that this doesn’t actually provide any legal protection at all, at best, and at worst, it may create legal difficulties that would not exist otherwise.
You also mentioned the possibility of 12-year-olds committing patches, there are a couple of problems here.
First off, it is unlikely a pre-teen has the knowledge to work with a codebase as complex as Blender’s.
Second of all, cyberspace is such a dangerous place for kids these days that they should not have online access at all (except for a very limited directory of sites) or be part of any online community or development scene of any kind. The BF can help preserve the innocence and wonder of childhood by banning the contributions of people under 18 years of age. This would make the risk of underage contributors a non-issue and resolve a major concern.
Looks like this has been resolved. Do you stand behind what you are submitting? Put your name on it. If that is a problem for you, put whatever name you feel like, or none at all. A symbolic gesture, and it was that way the whole time, it’s just being acknowledged now that it is optional. Which is to say it will remain as it already was instead of “requiring” a legal name.
Fear of underage coders having their name leaked, or accusations of insensitivity toward somebody’s personal issues with their own name, outweighed whatever benefit this provided. It’s for the best, but still kinda weird. If your name was actually a problem for you, the solution to working around it isn’t exactly a burden. Grab a name to attach, or find somebody with a real one that’s sympathetic to your issue and willing to vouch for your work.
Nobody was going to go to any lengths to verify who the PR authors were, they don’t even keep up with the content of the PR’s themselves. That is something worth actually caring about, but doesn’t have an easy solution. If something as small as providing a name would cut through some of the BS, it would be a great idea. But nobody was going to stop submitting PR’s because of this. Who cares about something that is so easy to work around, more than the reason you are submitting the PR? How much could the thing you are fixing about Blender matter at that point, when a name request is going to send you home?
If you read more carefully, you’ll see that what actually was said is that Francesco talked to a lawyer and decided against the real name policy. Clearly, the legal issues that created weren’t, to the Foundation, worth dealing with
I saw that and came to same conclusion. I’m saying it’s not a thing that would happen at the same time of course. But the benefits of a golden rule name request were even less valuable than a non-problem.
