6d ago

Is there an equivalent to the "Alan Smithee" pseudonym for a developer?

In the movie industry, directors sometimes sign their as "Alan Smithee" to indicate they don't recognize the movie as their own work.
This can happen for various reasons, one well known example is David Lynch for Dune (1984) who didn't want his name associated with the movie since he didn't have the final cut.

Is there an equivalent for the software industry to indicate one wants to distance themself from a commit or a project they don't approve?

10 comments

git commit --amend --author="Automated CI Action <no-reply@github.com>" --no-edit

Software very rarely has an individual's vision behind it in the same way movies do. At least publicly. There are a small handful of game developers you could say that about, but outside of games the only time a single creator's vision is relevant in that way is when they also do have creative control over it, and so the need for such a pseudonym doesn't exist.

Developers don't have unions so we often just get left out of the credits anyways.

// TODO clean this up

Never heard of this having a unique version for programming or development. These days, I suppose most "user names" are kind of like this for programmers and the necessity to not use the "same identity" in order to use most websites with a login service basically means you're SOL with coming up with a name that multiple people can adopt.
The closest we have is the hacker-worlds "Anonymous" or similar hacking groups where it's always unclear if it's one person or multiple in actuality.

Is there an equivalent for the software industry to indicate one wants to distance themself from a commit or a project they don't approve?
Other strategies might be better suited. For example, say you work on automobile steering software and management is cutting so much corners that things become unsafe. In that case, it might be best to write a mail to the legal department and naively ask some questions about safety and technical concerns. Then print it and take it home.
In general, if you can't ethically agree to a commit in open source software, it should be possible to withdraw that contribution.
There might be other cases where autorship or contribution to some software might expose you to discrimination. In that case, I think it is perfectly ok to work anonymously.

Use your corporate email instead of your personal

Dependabot

The closest thing I can think of is @author unascribed sometimes seen in Javadoc comments, but I don't think that's used in quite the same way as what you're asking.

I don't know, but I like the question. 😆

10 comments