i have outright deleted a major patchset i wrote for a project under freedesktop.org stewardship, which someone else is probably going to write again in a year or two, because i realized the project had a real-name policy, and decided it wasn't worth it. i then lost motivation for the cool thing i was working on that needed me to write that patch this is not the intended effect of a "real-name" policy, but it is the actual effect. and, as the cool kids say, "the system is what it does". there is no such thing as a "real name". the concept of a "legal name" is fraught, and most certainly is not what you think it is, or what you are looking for, if you are a software developer. many assumptions you have about what a "legal name" is probably are not true. consider this: the name on my birth certificate is different than the name on my drivers license, and that is different from the names i am called by my friends. those names are all different from what is likely to be on my passport when i get it, and all of those are different than the name i publish my open source projects under. all of these, in different jurisdictions, might or might not be something you could consider a "legal name". which one do you want me to use when i submit a major feature to your library? are you going to turn me away if i try to submit it as "linear cannon"? why? if i have a website and contact information under that name, why does this matter? how is it substantially different than an author of fiction novels publishing under a pen name? does it change if i produce a piece of government-issued documentation with that name on it? why, or why not? if your real name policy does not answer these questions adequately, then there's a very good chance i'm just going to assume that you're going to turn me away, as has happened to me several times already RE: it would be nice if it were actually as easy to contribute to free/open source software as the developers and maintainers of such software claim it is but meritocracy is a lie, and bullshit policies and procedures (see: "real name" policy) scare away minorities who might otherwise do important work