Whenever there is news regarding one of the members of the Asahi Linux team or their contributions, people write a bunch of really shitty comments trying to dig up the identity of that participant who very clearly does not want their real name associated with that identity or the project.

That and in the beginning there were a lot of very negative "they didn't really write that. someone else must have done the hard work for them" type comments as well.

So as a response the team wanted to just stop their stuff from showing up on HN but then the noreferrer thing happened and now we are here.

Oh, about the main developer being a vtuber? I can imagine people being shitty about that, but I always read through the Asahi posts when I see them and I've yet to see it come up here.

Not just being a vtuber, but outing them as an alter ego of marcan. Not exactly the nicest thing to do on HN's part (and I'm probably complicit by posting this comment), but also the information is already "out there" and blocking HN to keep it under wraps isn't a great strategy.

Wait, so this is about a virtual avatar identity project leader possibly being the alter ego of one of the other project leads?

I just naturally assumed that to be the case after doing a search on "Asahi Linux" as I knew nothing about that project.

If that is actually him and he doesn't want to be associated with that persona then making this video [0] was a weird choice... But in any case it seems natural that people are curious about this, after all it's a popular project and listing virtual avatars as members is strange.

At this point he should probably just own it if it is indeed him.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk

Someone sensitive to this kind of thing may already perceive this comment as offensive (because it contains an arguably overreaching suggestion and a hint of disgust), which seems like a good explanation for the strong response.

Because I'm not directly emotionally involved I can make the following response:

> he should probably just own it if it is indeed him

Well, maybe, but consider that he may just not want to. That should be respected.

> listing virtual avatars as members is strange

Not at all, really. Publishing under a pseudonym is the norm rather than the exception online, so is having multiple of them. Multiple on the same project may be unusual, but so what. They can do whatever the hell they want.

I agree on your other points and believe that a clear "we will leave this question open and would like you to stop wondering about it" would go further towards the goal than what's currently happening.

One question however: would Linus accept merging the commits signed by a pseudonym? Or Asahi patches would not be upstreamed due to this?

I believe these patches can be upstreamed, even under a pseudonym. Per a recent clarification of their policy: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

"using your real name" was changed to "using a known identity". And from the commit message:

> And despite the language, we've always accepted nicknames and that language was never meant to be any kind of exclusionary wording. [...] Just simplify the wording to the point where it shouldn't be causing unnecessary angst and pain, or scare away people who go by preferred naming.

That wording would lead me to believe that Asahi Lina as a pseudo-anonymous vtuber would not qualify for upstreaming. It sounds like they want to allow people to use preferred names that might not match their legal name but still are tied to their physical person.

AFAIK Linus has accepted plenty of patches from "Solar Designer" over the years.

At least initially they need someone else signing off with them and potentially even submitting on their behalf. But as it is now, it looks like if you submit high quality contributions for a sustained duration, they can eventually submit as just themselves.

Well that's not at all what I expected when I saw "harassment" accusations thrown around. Bummer for them if somebody caught on to their alter ego, but also a dick move to take it out on an entire community who happen to use the same website.

One way or the other I'm going to continue not caring who Asahi Lina is.