> And then there's https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/know-prevent-fix-fra... which effectively calls for the end of open-source contributors staying pseudonymous.

I think that will do more harm than good. First of all a lot of critical software is security related and encryption related and I would guess a higher proportion of contributors in that area are more sensitive to protecting their identity than the general developer population. So you would lose out on some contributions that you would otherwise have gotten.

Second, a major threat in this area arises from nation states. However, due to experience with physical espionage, nation states are already pretty good at establishing fake identities for people (for example it would be no problem for them to supply a fake (or even real) passport/ birth certificate/etc or turning people who are already working in critical areas. Thus getting rid of anonymity would not even be a speed bump for Five Eyes, Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

So I don’t thing there would be much benefit, but there would be a lot of cost.

I think a known pseudonymous identity is better than an unknown fake identity. Real names lower guard but most have no way to actually verify.

Whether or not there is an impenetrable fake identity is a different question from "now that identity Foo is untrustworthy, what other things do I need to inspect?"

For that, you don’t need any type of real world identity. If you require that people sign their commits/reviews with a PGP key and base their reputation on that, that still gives you much the same benefit, while at the same time allowing people to be anonymous.

To be clear, I agree.

The point I was trying to make was that stable identity, whether real or pseudonymous, has value in a security context.

From the second link:

> It is conceivable that contributors, unlike owners and maintainers, could be anonymous, but only if their code has passed multiple reviews by trusted parties. It is also conceivable that we could have “verified” identities, in which a trusted entity knows the real identity, but for privacy reasons the public does not. This would enable decisions about independence as well as prosecution for illegal behavior.

Who gets to decided who this "trusted entity" is?

For example, I don't want anyone to know my real name. I'm not up to any mischief (criminal or otherwise), I just want the separation of identities. There isn't a single entity on Earth that I'd feel safe delegating this knowledge with if I could avoid it.

It sounds like, unless someone is an owner or maintainer of a critical open-source project, the blog post isn't necessarily calling for that person's deanonymization. For projects that are both critical and owned/maintained by anonymous entities, I think it's reasonable for an organization to think twice before taking a dependency on such projects, given the sort of anonymous attacks mentioned in the article.

Disclaimer: opinions are my own, not my employer's (Google)

> I think it's reasonable for an organization to think twice before taking a dependency on such projects, given the sort of anonymous attacks mentioned in the article.

I'd argue that "thinking twice" should be the standard bar for all open source dependencies, not a discrimination levied towards anonymous or pseudonymous developers.

(Though, to be fair, I doubt Google would ever use any of my code. I know your cryptographers; they don't need me to contribute lol.)

Does someone at google want to be the "trusted entity"?

> which effectively calls for the end of open-source contributors staying pseudonymous

Among other things, attacking pseudonymity is an effective means for ensuring the exclusion of trans people, wherein they're forced to identify as their legal name (a.k.a. dead name).

Google needs to correct course on this if they're to be trusted at all.

> Among other things, attacking pseudonymity is an effective means for ensuring the exclusion of trans people

Like you said, trans people are far from the only ones affected. Here is a more extensive list:

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...

I was very aware of how it hurt LGBT folks, but that link really punctuates how bad these ideas are for everyone else too.

In most first world countries I'm fairly certain one can change their legal name.