tesfabpel

what about mail address and name for commits in a DVCS system like git (used by GitHub)?

there every commit has a hash which changes completely if some bit is altered leading to the following commit history to be invalid. it's very important for various reasons...

would the right to be forgotten apply there? if so it could cause serious problems to open source contributions.

anyway when one publishes a commit, he agrees to share whatever name and mail address he used when creating the commit (and those could also be fake)...

Just thinking...

You can't replace name / email without altering the hash of the commit. So it's when you create the commit (in your local PC, even before publishing it) that you have to use a pseudo.

When you contribute to OSS, it's your, the other contributors' and the public's interest that the code is not altered by a third party. Could this fall into public interest (even though it's just name / email)?

Also, you have the copyright of your work (even when you release it under some licenses). There could be cases that some project may want to change license under which it is released and in order to do so, it has to ask to all contributors who have copyright on it for agreement or, otherwise, to replace that part of the code. In this case (and maybe others) contact information should be important.

Whew, this is becoming complicated and we may need a lawyer to fully grasp it...