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.
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
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I made a GDPR demand against them, because they're in France.
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Their Data Protection Officer, Anne Combe, finally showed up to the job, mostly to lie to me and refuse to acknowledge my GDPR requests.
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Several months later, they put a name change policy in the spot where the transphobic rant had been in their content policy.
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.
