Re: Dishonest Forks? | Was - Re: [Namedroppers-honest] Brian Smith asks: Who is Dean Anderson?

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Faried Nawaz wrote:

> I've met just three or four authors of the software I use on my
> desktops or servers.  I've interacted with perhaps a couple dozen more
> online.  From a practical perspective, almost all the system software
> I use is from an anonymous source.

Most open source projects have a mailing address, or someone (a project
manager) who does have a mailing address, a history in the field,
usually a real job, and a phone number, more often than not, a
domainname, which also has this information.  Larger projects are often
incorporated, sometimes as non-profit, sometimes as for profit.

For example, the FSF has a physical address. Richard Stallman has an
office at MIT.

I went to freshmeat recently, and the first system software I found was
NetSecL (a linux distribution). It has a domainname netsecl.com,
registered to Yuriy Stanchev:

Registrant:
    Nobody
    Yuriy Stanchev        ([email protected])
    Bulgaria
    Sofia
    Sofija,1330
    BG
    Tel. +359.000000

I had never heard of NetSecl before, but it was not anonymous.

By anonymous, I mean /only/ an email address, I mean no domainname, no
history, nothing whatsoever but an email address from a free email site.  
e.g. [email protected] The project is distributed by
sourceforge, again setup by the email address only. This user and their
name just appeared recently, and has no previous history in any related
project, mailinging, or that field. Ordinarilly, if you give a name and
an email account, that person will have posted on some list on a similar
subject.  An accountant doesn't wake up one day and decide to launch a
Linux distribution; A linux guy might; a *bsd guy might; a sysadmin
might.  And one can find out something about that person just by looking
at lists that discuss linux issues; Pretty much everyone has a history.
They aren't really anonymous.  But I'm talking about a sockpuppet
distributing software.

By contrast, "Mark Johnson" is just a gmail account, which might be
created with an anonymous remailer and accessed via TOR.  There may be
no trail at all.  There is no employment history nor history at all
other than posts to the qmail list and the djbdns list over the past 
couple of years.

These are pretty easy arguments to follow, that is, if you agree with
the answers to the poll questions; and are a responsible system
administrator.

		--Dean



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