arborelia

The Software Heritage Archive wants to deadname me forever

Originally appeared in several posts on Cohost.

Part 1

(March 12, 2024)

The Software Heritage Archive is a project dedicated to creating a historical record of "important" pieces of software.

I made a piece of software called ftfy that fixes mojibake (Unicode mistakes) in text. It's in use in a lot of places, and I found out it was in the Software Heritage Archive. Then, I found out that nearly everywhere you find it in the archive, it's credited to my deadname. I only thought to look for this because I had heard of another trans woman's struggle trying to update her name in the archive.

I already fixed my name in my code. I updated the README and the copyright notice, and I ran git-filter-repo to rewrite the git history so it had always said my correct name, including in commits. This is a thing you can do.

I contacted the Software Heritage Archive (SWH) and asked them to change it. This started a process of over two years of me trying everything I can to get them to update my name and stop deadnaming me. They've said many different things on the topic, but the answer remains: no, they won't.

The reason is because they're a bunch of privileged cis people who have never comprehended the idea of data hurting somebody, but the other reason is a fucking blockchain.

You want to change your name? Blockchain says no

When I first contacted them, politely, they didn't even respond to me. What happened instead was that their content policy changed from a standard EU content policy to one that is very defensive about their ability to archive personal data forever with no exceptions.

A list of numbered points about their compliance with GDPR (RGPD in France, where they are located) suddenly grew this very very long 9th point, an unhinged, transphobic ramble about how personal data like names cannot be modified. Feel free to skim it.

9. You have the right to access your data. In accordance with article 21.6 of the RGPD, the right to object is not applicable, as the legal basis of Software Heritage is the execution of a mission of public interest, the long-term preservation of software source codes, carried out by Inria which is a public entity. Since one of the purposes of the data processing is scientific research, it is not possible to respond favorably to requests for deletion, rectification and limitation of processing for data identifying the contributors to the development of the source codes stored in the archive. Indeed, the identity of the contributor (first name, last name or pseudonym) is an integral part of the metadata which is essential to trace a software development, and is used in the calculation of the cryptographic key which allows both to link the various versions between them and to guarantee the integrity of these versions. Any modification would have repercussions on the whole chain and would invalidate all the keys of all the successive versions of the development, compromising the integrity of the archived contents, which are collected from public sources. The personal data contained in the development history cannot be modified, contrary to the personal data associated with the user identifiers specific to certain collaborative development platforms, which can be modified by the user. If you have any questions about the processing of your data in this scheme, you can contact the DPO

Did you catch that? The reason they can't just change references to your deadname, like any decent person would, is vaguely because of "integrity" (the common refrain of transphobic cowards), but more specifically because they made a fucking immutable blockchain out of it.

I should be clear: I'm not accusing them of running a cryptocurrency scheme. This is solely the more generalized form of "blockchain", where you create a big unchangeable append-only data structure for a purpose other than financial fraud. Which is what they did with people's code, and data about them such as their names.

Hold on, is it really fair to call them transphobic? They just want to, uh, deadname you for all of history

This would be some great dark humor, except that I've heard it too many times before, so it's not funny anymore.

The part where they try to explain to me that they're right and I'm wrong

I was on their content policy page because I was trying to figure out what to do about the fact that their "Data Protection Officer" straight up ignored my first e-mail, and I saw the transphobic rant. You can guess what happened next: I fucking exploded at them on Twitter.

This got a faster reaction than anything else I'd seen in the process. The rant against changing names in the content policy disappeared again. One of the developers went to my DMs to tell me condescendingly that I'd understood it wrong. It wasn't a blockchain, he explained, it's just a Merkle tree, like Git, because we copied your Git repository.

I screenshotted their documentation that said "blockchain". I pointed out that I understood their documentation, and that they weren't just copying repositories, they were making their own chain where they would assign their own immutable cryptographic IDs to people's code.

He said, but we have to do that, what if someone wanted to cite your code in a paper? You can't just change a citation.

I pointed out that you can just change a citation if it's wrong, and that I've gotten citations that deadname me changed. I pointed out that people cite my code under my correct name through Zenodo, not through whatever cryptographic bullshit SWH was dreaming up.

He said, well anyway, I don't see why this is our problem. You can't even change your name in your own repository! Imagine if people could just change history ha ha

I pointed him at my Git repository that I had already mutated using git-filter-repo.

He stopped replying.

What came next

Oh, so everything's okay now, right? They gave in and made a policy that lets people change names?

No. It's fake. You can try to follow their policy, but you just go in some sort of trans people database and they don't change the name they visibly call you on the website. Did you know transphobes can lie?

That's enough for part 1 and I've barely covered the last two years. In part 2, I go from merely being angry, to being legally angry in French.

Part 2

(March 13, 2024)

In part 1, I tried to get Software Heritage (SWH) to stop crediting my software called ftfy to my deadname. After I brought it up on Twitter, one of their developers DMed me to tell me that was impossible, because changing names would ruin the “integrity” of their data structures.

I give zero shits about the integrity of their data structures. I had already sent them a second email invoking the Right to Rectification, which it seemed like they ignored again, so it was time to get more formal.

SWH is run by Inria, a French government-supported research organization. I was convinced that the reason their Data Protection Officer felt they could ignore my e-mails was that I was writing them in English.

My level of being able to put together a French sentence is somewhere around « Je vais au supermarché en train », but I can kinda read it when there's enough cognates. With a combination of Microsoft Word with grammar checking, Wiktionary, machine translation to suggest sentences, a guide to writing formal GDPR requests in French, and a French acquaintance who was busy but could proofread the result, I got to it.

In the replies to part 1, @IkomaTanomori described “getting legally angry in French” as Western civilization's equivalent of going super saiyan, and that sounds pretty much right.

I sent a PDF formatted like a formal letter, addressed to « La déléguée à la protection des données, INRIA, Domaine de Voluceau Rocquencourt ». I had to look up who would be receiving the e-mail to get the gender right on « La déléguée ».

Here's how the message started:

Madame,

En application de l’article 21.1 du Règlement général sur la protection des données (RGPD), je m’oppose au traitement de mes données à caractère personnel par votre organisme, l’archive Software Héritage.

L’archive Software Héritage a archivé certains de mes projets logiciels en créditant mon deadname. L’archive répertorie également certaines adresses électroniques contenant mon deadname. Mon deadname est un nom que je n’utilise plus et que personne ne devrait utiliser pour moi, car il ne correspond pas à mon sexe.

(I added to the above since my original post, to include more of the message)

I described my request (including a lot of personal details), and concluded:

Dès lors, vous voudrez bien :

À défaut de réponse de votre part dans les délais impartis ou en cas de réponse incomplète, je saisirai la Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) d’une réclamation.

This is satisfying already. It doesn't hurt that French has cognates with all the fanciest words in English. But also, apparently how you write the salutation in French has none of this indirect English “to whom it may concern” stuff. I'm talking to you, madame. This concerns you.

It concerned her. Anne Combe responded the next morning to the email thread of messages I had sent.

Good morning

I have registered your request

But I didn't received your first request of Dec 9, 2021, neither by dpo@inria.fr nor by takedown takedown@softwareheritage.org. Just to understand why I didn't received your first request, can you tell me the email adress you used ?

I'd been using the same email address the whole time. After some follow-up, she claimed that my first message (which was quoted in all the others) had been caught by a spam filter. I don’t believe this, given all the other untrue things she’s told me by now, but I let it be.

A digression about French

French is a very gender-essentialist language. If I were non-binary, this would have made my task much, much harder. As it is, in reference to myself, I just had to make sure I was using all the correct feminine-gendered words.

One phrase that fascinated me was « mon nom de jeune fille » for “my maiden name”, because I needed to request that she correct my deadname to my maiden name, not to my current legal name (which I'd changed again by getting married a few months before). When both Google Translate and DeepL output a phrase that just means “my name of young girl”, I was sure they were doing an overly-literal mistranslation.

But I looked into it, and apparently that's really the phrase, used the same way as “maiden name”. The French language is being surprisingly affirming of my ability to retcon my name. The name I had from when I was 34 to 37 years old, but which I wish I had from when I was 0 to 37 years old: that's my young girl name.

It's open source, finders keepers

So here's a part of the problem that I haven't gone into yet. ftfy is a project on GitHub. One of the basic verbs you can do on GitHub is to “fork” code, making a copy of someone's repository in your own namespace, where you can edit it.

I had corrected my own code, but there were hundreds of forks. Some of them had been made in order to make pull requests. Most of them were absolutely trivial -- people had clicked the fork button and then done nothing at all with their exact copy of my code. That much is fine, except almost all of these copies refer to my deadname as the author of the software.

In previous e-mails, I had made a list of URLs of these incorrect forks that were clearly showing my deadname, and asked for them to be corrected. I was very clear about what needed to be corrected, and I followed up with all of Anne Combe's requests for information. I had provided my deadname, legal name, address, and a scan of my ID. And then she said no.

Unfortunately, the deletion or modification of the software repositories you requested cannot be performed, for several reasons:

We understand the concern about the display of outdated identities, and for this reason a mechanism has been put in place to display a preferred identity across all the Software Heritage archive.

This renaming will be put in place for you as soon as possible once you provide the information required.

We would like to stress that the approach taken by Software Heritage is in line with what is proposed today by large collaborative development platforms, such as GitHub, which also do not allow to remove or modify copies/forks of existing repositories

There's so much I needed to respond to:

Why do I care so much about the Software Heritage Archive compared to these forks on GitHub? Because these GitHub forks are just Internet detritus that nobody will look at. One day, GitHub will go down, just like SourceForge did and BitBucket mostly did. SWH knows that, it's a big reason for their mission.

So the problem is that they want to take this detritus that credits my deadname and record it forever. From what I heard they want to put a copy of it in a vault in Svalbard or something. And they don't even have my correct copy of the code.

Why are you hitting yourself?

I kept responding to the thread with no assumption of malice from Anne, just assuming that it was a series of misunderstandings due to the two of us speaking different first languages. Then she sent:

In order to better understand the situation, can you tell us why you want your deadname to be rectified in the Software Heritage archive while your deadname still appears in the history of your own project on Github as well as in all the forks that you have communicated to us?

Fuck that. She went to the "why are you hitting yourself" defense of deadnaming. And it's not even true.

I'm going to include my response in full:

Thanks for asking for this additional clarification.

My deadname does not appear in the history of python-ftfy on GitHub, to the best of my knowledge. I ran git-filter-repo on that project. But if there's a place that it remains, that's still not a justification for what your organization is doing.

Trans people should not be blamed for the places where their deadnames continue to appear. Trans people can keep their personal connections, keep their jobs, keep working on the same projects. In many places (including where I live) you're even required to publish your deadname in a newspaper ad when you change names. That means that deadnames will be visible to anyone determined enough to dig for them. But we need to be clear that this is an unethical thing to do.

The issue is, computer databases don't have any concept of data that's unethical to propagate, and the people designing them rarely show any concern about deadnames. This is one of my major areas of concern for my own name: how can I stop my deadname from constantly being propagated into new databases?

This has been particularly important where it intersects with academic citations: my deadname keeps propagating in citation databases, particularly Google Scholar. Even though I've changed my name on academic papers (having to overcome the objections of many publishers concerned about "integrity"), people find those papers via Google Scholar, which will not update names in a timely manner, and credit my deadname for them as a result. This undermines progress on my name change and leads to the concrete harm of me being denied credit for my work. I would use the GDPR on Google, too, if I could.

SWH's GitHub-scraping process has added to the list of databases that I have to be concerned about.

I have no control over the forks that others have made on GitHub (most of which are trivial artifacts related to pull requests, not forks in the software-development sense). I have no way to make these forks disappear from GitHub, but I can still be concerned about an organization that is scraping all forks that have ever appeared on GitHub. SWH is propagating information from those forks, and returning it at the top of search results, when it would otherwise be obscure and unseen.

If SWH were to remove those forks from its data, block them from the archiving process, and update the archive of my own repository, my deadname would not resurface in this way.

The GDPR provides an excellent tool for me to oppose the propagation of my deadname. This is a case that fits very well with the intent of the GDPR: it's personal data about me, it's harmful, I oppose the ways you are using it, and I want you to not have that data anymore.

The GDPR does not make an exception for organizations that are concerned about the "integrity" of the personal data they store (given a narrow and amoral definition of "integrity"), and if it did, everyone harvesting data would use that exception to defend the data's "integrity" from the GDPR.

I don't approve of the cosmetic fix that SWH has proposed instead. It's an insufficient proposal, made with no input from trans people. Before providing any data toward that cosmetic fix, I would need to know:

I don't intend to abandon the GDPR request, and a specific action that SWH could take toward fulfilling it is to remove the forks of my code that I listed from its archive.

I don't need to repeat the rest of the thread. She answered me with more bullshit and deflection, and a vague promise that SWH would be able to eventually write code to cosmetically change my deadname. (That code is still unwritten in 2024.)

At one point she took my description of how arXiV did it wrong as a suggestion for how SWH should do it.

And she never responded to a single time that I mentioned the GDPR.

I let her know that the undue delay constituted a denial of my GDPR request, and that I planned to escalate it to CNIL, the French data regulator.

Escalating it to CNIL

This took me a while. The whole conversation had worn me down, and now I needed to write a longer message in French, and fill in a form in French, to make a complaint about Inria to the CNIL.

While navigating CNIL's web site trying to figure out how to do this, I saw a portentious banner announcing their partnership with Inria.

I wrote a description in French of everything that had happened so far, and included PDFs of the e-mail thread (which are necessarily in English) as evidence, and sent it to CNIL. It was October 2022, seven months after Anne Combe's final refusal, when I managed to do this.

I got this form reply:

Madame,

Nous vous informons que votre demande n° 44-2161 a été transmise au service de l'exercice des droits et des plaintes de la CNIL.

Vous pouvez suivre l'évolution de votre demande depuis votre compte CNIL.

Well, good. They've received my request (demande is French for “request”), and I can go to their website to see its progress.

It has never made any progress.

I don't think they've rejected it as invalid, or even as “do you really expect us to read this long thread of English text”. It's just sitting there, years later.

I heard from the woman who I'd originally heard about SWH's deadnaming problem from, who was also trying to change her name. She said that she had gotten a response from CNIL -- and it was that the case was closed, because SWH claimed they'd implemented a cosmetic name-substituting mechanism (they have not) and that she was happy with the result (she is not).

The explanation I can come up with is that CNIL and Inria are friends, and CNIL will never take action against Inria.

I've looked at what my options are to proceed with trying to use the GDPR. Supposedly, if CNIL won't act, I'm supposed to be able to bring it up with my local GDPR regulator. Which doesn't exist, because I'm in the United States.

Apparently, according to the GDPR, I might be able to seek a "judicial remedy". Which is to say, it sounds like I would need to bring a lawsuit against CNIL, in France for their inaction.

I am not capable of doing this myself. I think my best follow-up here is to find someone who has the same problem and lives in the EU.

Okay, I'm mad on your behalf, is there anything I can do to help?

The most helpful thing is: if you are, or can connect me to, someone in the EU with a similar claim against SWH, you should let me know -- via a Cohost ask, a discord DM to arborelia, or @arborelia@computerfairi.es on the Fediverse, though I might be about to move to @arborelia@kind.social.

Or, if you happen to want to draw fan-art of my character throwing down a Power Glove and shouting “MADAME.”, it would make my entire year and give me the motivation to keep working on this.

In part 3, SWH writes a name change policy with no ability to implement it, and I try to play along.

Part 3

(March 14, 2024)

The Software Heritage Archive (SWH) doesn't want to think of themselves as transphobic.

I mean, sure, they've been doing a specifically transphobic thing, deadnaming me after I asked them not to, for over two years. But they're only doing it because the code (that they wrote) made them do it! And they have an idea for how to fix it, which is the same as fixing it, right?

It's all bullshit. They are not doing a thing to let trans people change names.

They eventually figured out that they could put a "Name change requests" section in their Content Policy, and people would get less mad at them than they would over what was there before, a bizarre rant about how name changes are bad and wrong. But the "name change requests", too, are bullshit. I know because I tried to make one.

To recap: I made a GDPR demand against SWH, which they ignored. I made a complaint to CNIL (the French data regulator) that they ignored a GDPR demand, which CNIL ignored.

It's over a year later, November 2023, and I have the urge to try again. The main venue where I could hold SWH accountable, Twitter, is now a far-right wasteland named X, and I've deactivated the account that was my public persona as a software developer.

But one thing changed about the SWH situation: they now have a name change policy. It's clearly lacking, but it's at least a better starting point than a flat denial:

People change their names and/or email addresses for many reasons. If you wish to change the name and/or email address that Software Heritage displays in association to archived version control system objects (such as commits) that you have authored, you can do so by contacting the Data Protection Officer (see contact information provided above).

"Quite a number of incomplete requests"

I was not the first trans software author to request to change my name in SWH, and clearly I was not the last.

You can see this bug on their public issue tracker, where they observe they are receiving "quite a number of incomplete requests" to change names. They put up a name change policy, and people tried to use it, at which point SWH needed an excuse for the fact that they didn't expect to have to actually implement their name change policy.

Their excuse is that we're sending emails wrong. It's not the most implausible excuse I've heard from them, but that's just because they have so many.

I try it and get lied to repeatedly

I write them an email in accordance with the policy, but I clarify that I'm not just asking them to change metadata "such as commits", I'm asking them to change my name everywhere it appears, like I did in my own repository.

Hello, this is [my name I use on software, which I'm omitting here mostly for search engine reasons]. I see that you have made your name change process more workable, which I found when I was looking at how to follow up on my original requests and my complaint against your organization. I would like to make use of this process.

Old e-mail addresses: [...] New name to credit: [...] New e-mail address: [...]

The software particularly at issue is my Python library named "ftfy". My deadname and former e-mail addresses appear in your archives of forks that others made of ftfy, before I changed my name and corrected the git history. They appear in the commit history and also in the README.md and LICENSE.txt of those forks. I request that you correct my name in all those instances, including in any bulk exports you make of your data.

It is important that you ensure my deadname is removed from your archives; it would be unconscionable for you to once again quote my software's license as a reason not to remove it. This is an issue of ethical handling of personal data and basic decency toward trans people, not of software licensing.

If there is a file in a fork that you are unable to correct, I request that you take down your archive of that fork.

Thanks, [name]

Anne Combe responds two days later: "The change will be made in the next few days."

[three entire weeks pass]

Anne Combe: "Your request has been processed."

Me: "Thanks. When should I expect it to take effect on the web site?"

Anne: "The change is effective, so do not hesitate to report any problems."

Me, not hesitating to report any problems:

The situation is the same as when I first reported it.

When you look at https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/search/?q=python-ftfy&with_visit=true&with_content=true, you get hundreds of forks of python-ftfy, many of them credited to my deadname, in both documentation and in git commits. Many of these are from the original list of URLs that I sent in my original e-mail about the problem, and they still contain the problem.

Remarkably, my own actual repository (https://github.com/rspeer/python-ftfy) doesn't even show up in the list.

At this point I have made a classic email mistake. If you inform your adversary about two problems, you are giving them the opportunity to choose which one to respond to.

[Three more weeks pass. It is now 2024.]

I hope you had a good holiday. Is there any progress on my request to change my name in your software archives?

If you're only offering to change my name on commit objects, then the process is unsuitable and you do not actually support name changes for trans software authors. If that's the case, you should let me know that.

It's been 22 months since I made my GDPR Right to Rectify request, which still stands.

Anne:

We have now rectified this issue, and are actively verifying its effectiveness across all forks. We sincerely apologize for this technical delay.

Me, with unfathomable patience:

I regret to say that it’s still not fixed.

My deadname still comes up in the README of dozens of trivial forks of my code, which are what comes up instead of the actual repository when I search for the repository name. Those READMEs are far more visible than commit objects.

Anne:

Thank you for your feedback. Now that the commit and release messages are properly fixed, we understand that it is important that your repository comes first in a search, and not buried under old forks whose READMEs have not been updated.

I am passing this information on to the technical team, to see what can be done to address this issue.

She's managed to change the topic using something I brought up. I wasn't asking them to correct a technical issue with their search! I was asking them to stop deadnaming me!

Me: "I would like to focus on Software Heritage Archive completing my name change request, or failing that, my GDPR demand. Do you intend to complete it?"

[no response for a week]

Me: "I'm inferring that the answer is 'no'. The name change process described in your revised content policy is a sham. I will be returning to using the GDPR."

At this point I make a second GDPR demand.

This is my second notice that I am exercising my Right to Rectify, under Article 16 of the GDPR (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr), against Software Heritage Archive. My first notice was given in February 2022.

The Software Heritage Archive is storing and disseminating inaccurate and harmful personal information about me on EU servers, by revealing my deadname and associating it with my popular Python package known as "ftfy" or "python-ftfy".

You must remedy this without undue delay. The delay has been undue for two years, but because I am clarifying my demand here, I will consider it "undue delay" if the harmful information is not rectified or removed in 30 days (by March 7, 2024).

[personal information omitted]

Any copy of python-ftfy stored on Software Heritage Archive that cannot be rectified must be removed.

Literally 28 days pass before I get this final dismissive response:

Software Heritage's mission is to collect, preserve and share all publicly available software in source code form, because it is the inseparable medium of technical and scientific knowledge, and does so by retrieving source code from the sites on which it has been made publicly available.

In response to your concern, the Software Heritage team has implemented an on-the-fly solution for displaying new first names or author names, and is currently developing another feature enabling original source codes to be displayed by default, so in your case, source codes containing your old first name will not be displayed by default. The technical team has indicated that this will take time, but is committed to making this work.

We're sorry we can't fully satisfy your request. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

I kept responding, but that's the last response I ever received from Anne Combe. The only other reply I've received from SWH is from someone else, when I notified their takedown address of an obvious copyright violation.

Their "on-the-fly solution" doesn't work. They know it doesn't work. They've lied to me about it several times, and they still have no plans to actually stop deadnaming anyone.

They also seem to know they are immune to the GDPR. Notice that whenever I mention the GDPR, they just never respond to that part.

What's next?

At this point we reach nearly the present, where my next course of action is to start writing these posts. It kinda works. My posts do severals. An iconic, non-binary retro-hacker boosts me on Mastodon. Lots of people send angry @'s to SWH's Mastodon account, which one day they're going to check and wonder what the heck happened.

And then I discover the unethical AI dataset project that they built out of their immutable references to code. You'd think I would have learned, from what happened before, not to complain to my adversary about two things, but dang I'm pretty upset about this second thing, and many other people are too.

Follow-up: France has my back

Someone on the fediverse has pointed out to me that French law is extremely clear that you can't publish someone's work while calling them by a wrong and nasty name.

The Wikipedia article on French copyright law describes how the privilege of authors over publishers is something that was fought for in the French Revolution.

Part 4

oh they stole ALL the code

(March 14, 2024)

When I was looking for more information about what recourse I might have against the Software Heritage Archive, who has been putting code that deadnames me and other people into their archive, I encountered this announcement of theirs:

https://www.softwareheritage.org/2024/02/28/responsible-ai-with-starcoder2/

They pivoted to AI! They were blockchain bros in 2018 and they pivoted to AI in 2023! Of course they did!

Now you don't have to be a European who changed their name to have an action you can take against them. Everyone who has put code on GitHub has a claim against them.

Their press release says "ethical" several times in hopes that it becomes true, but they have taken all the code they could possibly scrape from GitHub except sometimes leaving out GPL code. Apparently what makes it "ethical" is that you can ask for an opt-out, and they will try to remember to get around to removing the code you specified from later versions. Though of course we've seen how the Archive operates -- they'll most likely say "oh, we removed your code, but not this identical copy of it that we also have", or "we endeavor in the future to be able to remove your code".

Here are some calls to action:

No matter what they say, they are not following your license unless your license is equivalent to the public domain.

Every open-source license I know of has an attribution clause. Even for permissively licensed code, they have to credit the author, and usually they have to include the license text that allowed them to use the code.

They claim that users of their model are responsible for following all the attribution clauses, and they claim that they provide the information to let users do so. For one thing, licenses don't work that way! You can't break a license and then say it's someone else's job to comply with it.

If their supposedly reassuring statement about attribution were true, each user of the model would have to write pages of license text next to every line of code they "wrote" (plagiarized) using the BigCode model. I assure you, no user is doing that. But also it's just not true, because there is no language model that is capable of correctly attributing its sources. They are simply lying, which is very common in claims about generative AI.

Also, if you didn't put a license on your code, the default license on GitHub is just that GitHub can store your code and forks of it. It's "all rights reserved" for everyone else. SWH took repositories like that also.

Remember, "fair use" is not a thing in France. They just stole your code.

Part 5: what happened since then

Updates from between March and September 2024:

I got a sincere-sounding apology about deadnaming from the director of the Software Heritage Archive.

I am no longer being deadnamed on Software Heritage Archive's copies of ftfy, my most popular open source package.

They took down all the deadnamey copies of it and left just my official one, plus an OpenSUSE package that is up-to-date enough to have my correct name. (OpenSUSE is a thing that's still updated??)

I won't consider this a victory until they document the process so another trans software author can use it, and that process works without anyone having to email all their personal information to the bureaucrat from hell.

They still haven't made such a process.

HuggingFace made a "v2.1" of The Stack which honors people's opt-out requests. They have not trained a model on it. Their language models are still trained on v2.0.1, which did not honor opt-out requests.

So really nothing has changed about trans software authors being deadnamed by SWH, and nothing has changed about the fact that SWH stole everyone's code and HuggingFace trained an AI on it.

#name changes #software heritage archive #trans rights