Social accountability, for one. Never underestimate shame as a motivating factor for humans. I'm generally in favor of protecting anonymity, so I'm not fully in agreement that this should be a hard requirement for a software project, but I can at least see the appeal of the idea.

Web browsers are also a rare class of software with high complexity and also high privilege (considering the data that typically passes through them), so perhaps higher scrutiny of this class of software is warranted.

Don't forget the shockingly high number of folks with a distorted sense of shame.

Imagine that you have a choice between two pieces of software. The developer of one of those pieces of software is Linus Torvalds. The developer of the other piece of software is Mikhail Vasiliev.

Which one do you choose?

The one that puts the source code online and it compiles on my computer.

And if both do that, have same features, work the same, etc., no other difference, then I'll take the smaller one - because the larger one most probably includes something I don't want, even if it's just bloat or inefficient code.

> Linus Torvalds

For me, he lost his credibility, when, with childish "historical" arguments, he choose to ban russian developers from the linux kernel. Can we still trust him to not insert a backdoor in the kernel, "to fight the russians" ?

The license will not protect the developer from law if they added a malicious backdoor.

How so? It's their program, who's to say what is a "malicious backdoor" versus an "intended useful feature"?

What's the difference between a backdoor and remote support access?

Reputation harm.

An anonymous individual might also have multiple anonymous accounts, for example. Without that anonymity, other projects might ban their contributions, and users might not use their software.