Anonymous contributors and contributors to open source projects

Question

As a witness in various open-source projects in which I participated, several more or less significant completely anonymous contributions, I wonder what could be a possible justification for such anonymous contributions?

Sometimes there are participants who obviously prefer to remain completely anonymous, that is, simply sending them to the mailing list, using the obvious name for the name for several months (while everyone else will use their real name), and sometimes even by sending a completely anonymous corrections for trackers on sourceforge, where there wasn’t even the slightest comment about sources / authors, usually it’s just a license heading or a heading saying that this code should be released to the public domain Ie.

Often the code in question was clearly written by sufficiently competent programmers / developers or even software engineers who supposedly make code for life.

I am wondering:

• What is the motivation for such contributions?
• Have you witnessed similar and similar cases in open source projects before?
• Did you possibly contribute to an open source project this way?
• If so, why?
• Can you imagine any other idea about this?

After you read one more question here on SO, and also after you read two related discussions (in slashdot and perlmonks ) about potential contract work issues with open source projects, what do I some participants may prefer to remain completely anonymous due to their contractual requirements in order to avoid possible legal problems.

thanks

Answer 1

I can think of several reasons:

• some people just value privacy - I know that I usually don’t post on most forums with my name - SO is an exception for me (and even here it was only after a couple of months);
• many programmers work in places where part of the employment contract states that any code that you write (whether corporate time or not) belongs to the employer. Regardless of whether these conventions can be applied to materials, the programmer may want to avoid a “flaw” in the presentation or may want to avoid going through bureaucratic hoops to get permission from the employer;
• The applicant may not want to seek support;
• the submitter cannot be particularly proud of the code (right or wrong);

Answer 2

I have two fairly popular open source projects. I have accepted such contributions. The rationale is simple. They use the project and want the problem to be resolved or the function implemented sooner rather than later.

The contribution benefits them!

Answer 3

The most likely reason I can think of is because they have some kind of contract binding that prevents them from contributing openly, for example, working on a large software corporation that considers open source projects as potential a responsibility. Or they just don’t want to worry about people requiring additional information or additional support.