Why did it get removed? This kind of thing needs to be left up as evidence of their incompetence and as a warning to others that would follow in their footsteps.
Sorry, I think this might tangentially be my fault. I know someone who works on the GitHub team and let them know about the situation via IM. A few minutes later both the account and the issue disappeared.
25 years ago someone put their corporate email address in some comments in the source code of this project. Now that company has outsourced their reputation to the lowest bidder, who is claiming that the address reveals secret or private information about the internal network of the corporation.
This is a common scenario for trans people who want to keep their previous identities secret for safety reasons. Git does not handle committer name changes by design, but I certainly wish there was some way of handling this scenario somehow. It’s not clear to me how one would maintain project provenance while allowing this use case.
When I changed my name, I submitted a PR to change it in the CONTRIBUTORS file of a project I had fixed a bug for. The approver privately reached out to me and offered to coordinate a global history rewrite among the core devs on my behalf. I declined because I don’t have that sort of safety need, but I’m incredibly grateful that there are maintainers out there who would be willing to go out of their way for something like that to help a non-core dev out.
It's an interesting question. There are politically loaded repos and potentially someone may regret their contributions over a 20 year period. I don't see a valid exemption in the GDPR. The closest seem to be the personal activity exemption (subject could go after GitHub though) and public interest archiving, but I don't think the latter stands in the case of a public code repository.
It looks to me like it's not even the corporation they worked for but an external corporation claiming to represent the corporation that the user worked for 25 years ago
