Am I locked out of open source contribution?

2023-10-29 @rrobin

A rant written as a short story with way too many analogies that don't work.

This is an all too popular story, boy meets girl ... errr software developer finds a nice software library out there and uses it to build another piece of software. The software works and said developer pours his weekends into raising the little software package, having fun and learning a new programming language.

One day our titular developer finds a problem, a feature is missing from the dependency and is needed for his little software package to work properly. Other libraries in other languages have said feature, so this looks like a nice opportunity to be nice citizen and contribute back.

The change does not look too hard, so hopefully the maintainer will accept a patch. So we open our browser and search for the dependency, it is hosted in gitlab.com (nice, we like alternative forges, diversity is good). We don't really have a gitlab account so lets create one, pour our email address into the registration form, and get a verification email (a classical tale these days).

This is however when this story takes a very dark turn, rather than being able to use the verification email to enable my account I get a form like this

Now our developer is left with some choice:

give away private information to be able to nurture his software package and contribute back code

fork the dependency, keep it internal piece of code

find some other way to send your patch upstream

This may sound like too much thinking for such an insignificant dilemma. But our character has a bit of past in this field, in his youth he fought on the privacy wars of the 2000s and gets cold sweats when inserting his email in web forms. Phone and credit cards numbers cause him to have full blown panic attacks. And he deals with this by being a bit of an hermit and steering clear of such things.

In other words our developer is a, mostly harmless, privacy zealot. But this has consequences, he does not get invited to some barbecue parties, and his software package does not go around playing with other software packages.

Is this good, bad, meaningless? Who knows? I think I've stretched this analogy way too far for my own good, so I'll stop here, besides the question in the title remains unanswered ...