Taking the Eudyptula Challenge

Posted May 25, 2014 5:11 UTC (Sun) by geuder (subscriber, #62854)
Parent article: Taking the Eudyptula Challenge

Very interesting indeed. (I do patch the kernel at work, but despite of and of course because of following lwn for years I know that there are still far too many things I don't know to dare to send anything upstream. Which partly could be a character flaw of mine seeing some parts, which have made it into the kernel and watching others still trying as we just read an article further up)

What surprises me a bit is the use of a pseudonym. Not that I remember any explicit rule in open source that that you must contribute under your own name. Nor that many contributions to open source projects needed to be digitally signed, which could give some evidence that the contributor has presented her or his passport at a key signing party. But generally the rule seems to be that while you can use a fairly cryptic irc nick, people do use their real names when working on open source.

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Taking the Eudyptula Challenge

Posted May 25, 2014 15:57 UTC (Sun) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (2 responses)

> What surprises me a bit is the use of a pseudonym.

The only pseudonym in play here is for whoever is running the Challenge.

> Not that I remember any explicit rule in open source that
> you must contribute under your own name.

Actually there is that requirement when signing off on a patch, so participants in the Challenge will need to use their real name when submitting patches.

The ID that gets assigned is just used for tracking within the Challenge scripts and such. It is also used in some of the tasks, but not those that are headed upstream.

jake

Taking the Eudyptula Challenge

Posted May 26, 2014 18:55 UTC (Mon) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link] (1 responses)

>>What surprises me a bit is the use of a pseudonym.

> The only pseudonym in play here is for whoever is running the Challenge.

And this is the one my comment was referring to.

For me running such challenge is a form of contribution to an open source project. And I found it astonishing that this contribution is not made under the contributor's real name.

> Actually there is that requirement when signing off on a patch, so
> participants in the Challenge will need to use their real name
> when submitting patches.

Yeah, I didn't refer to participants of the challenge, but to code contributors in general, not necessarily only the Linux kernel. I erroneously thought nobody really requires contributors to state their real name, it's just a common practice to do so. Now I checked the facts and the Linux kernel community rules actually require everybody to do so, although they don't enforce it by requiring a digital signature as e.g. in Debian upload. (of course these are different processes, and I'm not saying they should enforce, just illustrating the difference)

> then you just add a line saying
>
> Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
>
> using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)

(quoted from https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches)

Taking the Eudyptula Challenge

Posted May 27, 2014 12:08 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

The kernel project is distributing code from contributors; there needs to be some sort of chain of trust and accountability for that code. Eudyptula is not asking the community to distribute anything, so there is no risk there. If the developer(s) behind Eudyptula want to stay anonymous, it doesn't seem like that should be a problem for anybody.