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Comment by jart

6 hours ago

This is great example of the toxic effect money has on open source. Reward people with respect and recognition instead. Weird anonymous accounts no one's ever heard of will leave, because someone (or something) who's concealing their identity has nothing to gain from recognition. Honestly GitHub should have a real names policy. Because if you're not Satoshi Nakamoto then there's only three reasons I can think of to be anonymous on GitHub: (1) to avoid obtaining your employer's authorization, (2) to spam, harass, and engage in toxic behaviors, or (3) you're not even human. All three of these are the last things I want when engaging on the GitHub platform. Don't get me wrong, I love robots. But I'm perfectly capable of talking to the robot on my own. I don't want to talk to your robot. I also don't want people slipping me intellectual property below the board without their employer's consent. And I certainly don't enjoy all the hate and harassment. GitHub has tried to help with the last part, by making overt displays of hate something that can get you in trouble. The issue is that people just get more guilesome with more anonymous accounts, because the issue was never disrespect (which can actually be strategic and pro-social if we look at Torvalds' career), but rather bad faith participation. If GitHub can guarantee that all its users are human real names good faith actors, then we might be able to start talking about open bounties.