Yes. After Dejanews resurrected ancient Usenet postings, I stopped using my real name online for most things. But my flaw was using a single pseudonym almost ev

Yes. After Dejanews resurrected ancient Usenet postings, I stopped using my real name online for most things. But my flaw was using a single pseudonym almost everywhere. So now my insightful Slashdot comments (that was years ago) are by the same userid that posts stupid photoshops on Fark. I can't "claim" my existing identity on one site without claiming all of them. So a few years ago I moved to site-specific ("unlinked") IDs. If I someday wanted to stick my real name on my HN profile, it would be easy and it isn't linked to other sites. I've also gone to indistinct userids (ja27) that are almost impossible to Google. (Just as I say that, I see that my HN profile is now the top result for my id. Nothing else appears though.) But back to the original question. I rarely contribute to open source, mostly due to time issues, but when I do it's always as a pseudonym. My current company may be ok with some open source project contributions but having been acquired twice in 5 years (and always considering changing companies) I don't want to take the chance that a new boss would change that. I also wouldn't want to make it easy for a patent dispute to spill over between my paid closed source work and open source.