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Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

so, maybe this is a dumb question, but is Asahi Lina just marcan with a pitch modulated voice and an anime avatar?

That's what I thought after the first stream since it was April 1st. But after a while, I don't think so. Then again, who cares - let's enjoy the show :-) For the kernel contribution issue, we'll see. If you can reverse engineer a GPU, you can figure out a solution to that issue too.

I believe it's someone else, but I don't think she's been explicit about the connection.

It might be a bit different across the community, but it's usually considered polite not to "dox" (however obvious in some cases) VTubers who have public personas under a different name. There are only so many Asahi developers though.

Assuming they want to upstream their changes, that kind of runs in conflict with the Linux kernel community's "contribute under your real name" policy. Of course, given the general queering of hacker and open source culture we've seen over the past half-decade or more, it may be that demands for use of "real" (legal/dead) names is now considered outdated and marginalizing.

Is that a new(-ish) policy because I can swear that I've seen a few l33t handles among the contributors? I haven't really done any kernel development for a decade, so I'm not following it closely.

It shouldn't be a problem anyway, because someone else can contribute it, it's not like it's that one guy sending the pull requests who writes all of AMD's giant blob of GPU code.

They might end up offering the changes for merge under a name other than "Asahi Lina". Who knows? I don't see any particular conflict with the immediate development happening under their VTuber identity, but I'm not much of a kernel hacker, either.

At any rate, it's kind of their problem to worry about, if they even choose to worry about it. I think the work stands on its own merits.

The work is good, but they need to submit it under a real name. The Linux kernel will lose trust if anonymous contributors with hidden interest start contributing code to it, regardless of its quality.

You can judge the quality of a contribution by looking at the code. Who wrote it is completely irrelevant. The trust in the Linux kernel never came from knowing the names of all the people that contributed to it.

Not really, though.

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