[_cenw]

You are misunderstanding. You can discuss your conspiracies anywhere you want, just not on a post pointing to the people that have to deal with the fallout of your unfounded conjecture.

Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.

[troad]

> Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.

If I contribute my code to an open source project, then I - as the copyright holder - agree to license my work under an open licence.

If I use an OSS project, I am using other people's copyrighted work under an open licence from them. Without that licence, I have no legal basis on which to use that work.

Only real people can (currently) hold copyright. If person X writes some code, but the licence (incorrectly) attributes the copyright to person Y, and person Y purports to give me an open licence to use that work, then - crucially - I have no license from the actual copyright holder (person X) to use their work.

Until an effective open source license is made, this code is not open source; it is completely proprietary. If person X chooses to sue you for copyright infringement, it is no defence to say that you're using it under a license from person Y, because person Y had no right to give you that licence.

This is a major ethical and legal problem. I would be very wary of the Asahi codebase.

[_cenw]

If you wanted to split hairs this thin, you wouldn't use any project with at least one german citizen as contributor, since they can never truly yield all copyright on a work. You'll be fine. Anonymous contributions to free software (or even entire releases done anonymously, e.g. Bitcoin) are not actually uncommon.

As I said, very weird hangup to have, definitely not motivated by other reasons.

[troad]

> If you wanted to split hairs this thin, you wouldn't use any project with at least one german citizen as contributor, since they can never truly yield all copyright on a work.

Nor can anyone else, copyright is not generally 'destructible'. That's why it's a licence. The holder keeps the copyright, but licenses the work to the general public. (Assignments are another way to achieve something like this, provided the assignee then licenses the work.)

I assume what you're referring to is inalienable moral rights - hence the reference to Germany - but those are a feature of many (most?) of the world's legal systems. They are included in one of the revisions to the Berne Convention, if I recall correctly, which is an international treaty on intellectual property.

I understand you're sceptical, but the legal dimension of OSS does matter. Using copyrighted material without a licence would constitute a major business risk. I would appreciate it if you could kindly refrain from making ungenerous assumptions about the intentions of others.

[PrimeMcFly]

What makes ze Germans special?

[_cenw]

Right to moral objection.

[PrimeMcFly]

That doesn't explain anything. Can you elaborate?

[_cenw]

The most commonly cited example is a musician objecting to use of their music during a neo nazi rally. They won that case as the court judged the integrity of the work to be compromised.