In the movie industry, directors sometimes sign their as “Alan Smithee” to indicate they don’t recognize the movie as their own work.
This can happen for various reasons, one well known example is David Lynch for Dune (1984) who didn’t want his name associated with the movie since he didn’t have the final cut.
Is there an equivalent for the software industry to indicate one wants to distance themself from a commit or a project they don’t approve?
Never heard of this having a unique version for programming or development. These days, I suppose most “user names” are kind of like this for programmers and the necessity to not use the “same identity” in order to use most websites with a login service basically means you’re SOL with coming up with a name that multiple people can adopt.
The closest we have is the hacker-worlds “Anonymous” or similar hacking groups where it’s always unclear if it’s one person or multiple in actuality.