Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.
Stored “because law”, right?
Who cares why it is stored, these fields exist for every user in every Linux system and they have existed for decades.
Either birthDate the field is dangerous or it isn’t. If it is, how?
It is no different than data fields that ask for way more identifiable and personal information such as Real Name and Office number which have, again, existed for decades without issue.
Ah, but this time the government wants it to be able to be queried so that applications and web sites can decide what to do with you. That’s the difference.
The government’s wants are not in the PR. The PR is an optional JSON field.
The field isn’t dangerous, you’re conflating two different things.
The age verification laws are the threat, not an optional text field or the developer who added it.
I care. One thing is “you know, fields with this name have been around since before you were born”, another thing is “some idiots passed the law half the globe away, now we are preparing your system to comply. Someone has to ©”. The field is not the danger, the thinking, attitude and act is
Edit: some local law, for fuck’s sake
Half a world away where do you live since this is happening everywhere. To be half a world away from any place doing this would be hard.
Being half a world away from Americas is pretty easy, don’t ya think?
That’s a fair argument.
Is it fair to say: The field is benign but there is contention about if it should be added or not and users of the software are concerned that their voices were not heard on the issue. That can be handled in the normal project framework, perhaps by suggesting a publicly stated policy about these issues around legal compliance so the community can determine if they want to support the project or not.
My argument is that I don’t think that the damage that was done justifies the hitpiece in the OP which is, almost literally, painting a target on the developer with the mugshot photograph and loaded language.
So, if you’re not one of the people then we’re having different conversations. In that conversation, I do agree with what you just said. I’d like to see the very large projects, which affect a lot of users, such as systemd, have a more formal way to accept public comment and respond on contentious changes and feature requests.
It is not a hit piece. No call to action was stated.
It paints him as an active danger, puts his picture on a wanted poster, includes his full name, workplace and the city and state where he lives and then writes up an article like an after action report of a cyberattack.
It then implies that he’s going to do it again and that he can’t be persuaded and so will be ‘harder to stop’.
So if he’s done a bad thing, he’s going to do it again, and you can’t persuade him.
If you can’t read the implied call to action then you’re being deliberately dense.
To be fair, I am bit split on this. On one hand, name and shame is an effective strategy and should be used. On the other hand, “put age verification into Linux” is a hilarious stretch. And yes, it feels strange that I have yet to see any kind of response from other systemd maintainers and managers - after all, the man authored a pull-request, not merged into into upstream. I have not been looking for that kind of response myself though, which also serves your point: putting all the blame and anger on this one man (I purposefully omit name) is too much
It is benign if it is optional, remains 100% local and under the user’s control and doesn’t prevent other software from functioning as expected.
It is optional, 100% local, under the user’s control and does not prevent other software from functioning as expected.
If it ever is not, then you can simply fork the project at or before that change.