On Saturday, March 23, 2002, at 01:23 PM, Adam Back wrote: > On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 12:23:17PM -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote: >> The number of programmers that would publish a usable package which >> has not even theoretical means of being traced to them is very >> limited. Even signing it and keeping the key is a risk. >> >> [...] >> >> The fact that such even never happened supports this view. > > Historically there were some relatively significant packages > anonymously published: eg Pr0duct Cyphers' magic-money, Henry Hastur's > PGP Stealth; possibly there are others which have not especially tried > to draw attention to the fact that they were strongly anonymously > published. The bit-police would then find that out later if and when > they tried to trace the author, and when the trail is years cold, the > remailers used and their keys long gone.
There are other examples of "one man projects with limited expectations of financial gain," whether anonymity was an issue or not. Stallman comes to mind. Ditto for a lot of the early Unix tools, even entire languages. There was no need for anonymity or pseudonymity with the GNU work, or with Perl, but this could change at the rate things are now going. Many people are motivated by ideology more than a desire for (often meager) financial benefits. Sure, most people want some recognition, or some compensation. But they often do things even when there's no prospect at all for recognition. Anonymous benefactors, for example. And some people already have enough money to keep themselves happy...they are motivated primarily by ideological sorts of reasons. Examples abound. This all seems so obvious to me. --Tim May "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked ...A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." -- Grady Booch
