Re:VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS...
by nybble41 on Friday June 03, 2022 @01:14PM
(#31611032)
> Something as minor as changing what user handle is displayed was probably hand waved away, if it was even considered, yet here in this thread we have a demonstrable case of a user losing trust and confidence in the project simply as a result of this decision.
If displaying the same "author" data resulted in users assuming that a given username on the Open VSX site should be trusted just because it happened to match a username on the VS Code Marketplace, it's probably a good thing that Open VSX displays the name differently. These are two different sites, and two different accounts; trust in one should not imply trust in the other. It would be even better if Open VSX could somehow ensure that the displayed author names never match the corresponding projects on VS Code Marketplace, for example by integrating a domain name or other globally-unique component into the author field.
This isn't a huge issue, but it's one of the larger issues why FOSS alternatives are not often as well received as their proprietary counterparts (see: unix). Consumers/users should be the first/only consideration when designing user-facing software, but it's a rare sight to see in FOSS. I wish more FOSS developers cared about the software instead of the code, because the difference manifests in decisions like this.