Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
Sure, but personally, I don’t want a linux community that’s driven by corporate needs and governments that have been paid off by them. I don’t view it as a catastrophe, if that’s the version of “the linux community” that we lose.
None of that is to say that harassing devs is correct. It’s not, and never is. Harassing anyone with death threats and dogpiling is not on. But if we take that out of the picture, negative pushback that drives away devs that would otherwise have helped implement universal age gating isn’t something I’m terribly upset over, because I don’t want the version of community they’re taking us towards
this version IS the community and they’re not taking us anywhere where we weren’t already going.
linux is a much a product of our society as are other things like pop culture and capitalism. corporations of all sizes and reaches (ie red hat, ibm, google, facebook, etc.) have always steered the path and decided upon the development trends that linux has always taken and the only people who could have prevented or mitigated further centralized enshitification (aka the linux kernel developers group) bent over backwards to comply with the american government’s overreach when they kicked out russian developers.
age verification is just the next step into this overreach and it too is being driving from the same corporate/government source that forced us all to accepting things like systemd or libvirt/kvm (facebook for the former and red hat for the latter) to service their profit motives.
like american politics, it’s still possible to reverse the trend; but also like american politics; it requires a greater deal of collectivist action that westerners are unwilling to risk out of fear of losing their own tiny piece of the pie.
I though that was mostly due to Linus being a typical Russia-hating Finn, but I never investigated.