They haven't fixed anything yet, but I got a sincere sounding apology from the director of Software Heritage. It's a start!
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. I've got some other code I'll need to apply the process to, so I can see how that goes.
SWH is fixing things rapidly. I can tell from their Gitlab that handling takedowns and blocking harmful PII are suddenly a top priority for them.
I can surmise some things that might have happened:
- Most of them just didn't know, and the bureaucrat who was responding "no" to all the name change and takedown requests for them wasn't telling them
- They saw my post about the laws they were breaking, and it checked out
- The number of queer software developers who were mad at them became an existential threat
- They finally checked their Mastodon notifications
we hope they do follow through all the way and stuff. thanks so much for your efforts
