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.

  • mub@lemmy.ml
    123·
    4 hours ago

    So they added a date of birth field. Not technically doing anything wrong but a concerning direction morally. If it wasn’t for the fash / authoritarian bullshit in the world that field wouldn’t be a problem.

    However, the question is how should the Linux community respond. Rather than grabbing pitch forks we should do what the Linux community does best. Support the alternatives, be it a fork or a replacement stack.

    I’m watching for what lands and becomes popular. It seems inevitable that Devs in countries that aren’t forcing ID checks will build what we need. I hope to see either a fork of systemd free from redhat influence (always suspicious of large corps), or a true set of alternatives that can realistically replace the systemd stack.

    The community will drive the change. Put down your pitch forks, pick up your keyboard yourself, or just support the good Devs instead.

    I expect someone will just make a systemd patcher package that removes the field and provides clean error handling for anything that tries to use it.

    • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      You’re not going to get something complying with Californian law out of Brazil (for example), so you’re talking about diverging. California can have it’s own version. Sadly that pushes burden onto maintainers that may not be interested in dealing with the pain.

      The engineering mindset is to have it support both use models, but that is explicitly what people don’t want. Hidden features which enable authorities to enforce toxic concepts.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        1·
        13 minutes ago

        The engineering mindset is to have it support both use models, but that is explicitly what people don’t want. Hidden features which enable authorities to enforce toxic concepts.

        What toxic concepts can authorities enforce with your birthDate that they could not already enforce with your realName?

        This is a question that nobody has an answer to.

        The entire premise of this argument is that adding birthDate allows for some new kind of oppression not previously possible and so it should be fought or else someone will use it in a bad way.

        Except, if that were true, these hypothetical evil forces could already have access to your REALNAME and LOCATION. Both of which are fields that have existed since the 60s.

        That hasn’t happened, those fields, like birthDate were added to allow support for some use cases and outside of those uses cases (which, you have to choose to implement because you are in complete control over your system in the FOSS world) the fields are completely optional and not used.