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.
Threatening anyone with harm because you disagree with them is horrible. Things have gone too far on the internet. If we just ran after everyone who we disagree with then we wouldn’t have civilization left.
When you discover the reason for his bootlicking you will be ashamed of your words and deeds.
Lost me at “If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law”
How does that boot taste?
Agree death threats are crazy harassment, etc but I definitely wish I’ll will towards fascist collaborators.
I’m going to bullet my thoughts on this whole thing because I’m annoyed by the general response, and the implementation as well:
- I don’t wish harm on the dev and I don’t dislike them. I don’t even know them
- Death threats are ridiculous; that’s the working class attacking itself again
- That said, I want to know what compelled this dev to preemptively implement this field not in 1 but in 2 separate PRs
- Both the field and the law itself do not serve the user at all; it’s a bullshit vague law that is using children as cover—again (I’m old enough to know how this game works)
- I’ve always viewed Linux as the rebel among all of the corporate slop we have to constantly dodge, so it is super gross when I see changes in Linux that were made to appease laws built and pushed by fascist tech companies and governments
- Did the dev even open a line of discussion anywhere, or was the PR supposed to be used for that?
- What’s his motivation? Money? Fame? I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows
- I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this. Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations? How do people not see that this is the beginning of the wedge? And let’s say it peters out and nothing else happens. I’m not going to be ashamed of the fact that I was a squeaky wheel over it because I’ve seen how these things go. You follow the money and suddenly the bigger picture comes into focus. Why on earth a meager single little dev would implement this, unprompted, is just beyond my reasoning.
This reminds me of when Guillermo Rauch from Vercel praised Trump multiple times. Bro, you’re not Tim Cook. You’re not Ellison, Zuck, or Musk. You’re not even on their level. You’re not going to get on their radar. I have PTSD from fellow tech folks being weirdly aligned with fascism and this whole dumb thing is giving me that vibe again. I don’t think this is that 1:1, but this is like the metal scene. You have to dodge the fascists that seem to weirdly permeate corners of the culture. People that refuse and get annoyed by right-wing labels, but still help right-wing grifters, are their own unique brand of pathetic.
What’s his motivation? Money? Fame?
Why does anybody submit changes to any project? Probably a wide variety of reasons.
I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows
I hope that you can see that there are people who see this addition as being not a big deal: optional field, no verification, GECOS fields already storing ‘realName’, ‘location’, etc.
It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to understand why a person would submit a simple update when they don’t think it’s of world changing significance.
I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this.
I’m one of those people so maybe I can help.
Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?
Yes, we are. That’s why I don’t use their software or services. The major, and most important, reason why this isn’t a big deal to me is that Apple, Meta and Microsoft don’t choose the software that is part of my system. We’re not in commercial software land, this is the FOSS world. Here, I get to choose what happens on my system because I am the one in completely control.
If a project decides that I have to submit to age verification then I simply won’t use their project, it’s just that simple. But, that is not what is happening here. There is no verification of any sort, nor is the operation of systemd affected by this field in ANY way.
I don’t buy the slippery slope argument that’s being presented around this topic which makes the change seem like the beginning of fascisim or the end of privacy or whatever other hyperbolic situations that people are breathlessly inventing to justify their outrage.
We already have fields to store personal data and those fields are optional and rarely used. They exist because they are needed in some cases and in the cases where they are not needed they do not do anything. The birthDate field is exactly the same as the realName field in that sense. It only does something if you choose to install software that uses it.
This field will NEVER affect you unless you choose to install software on your system that requires it.
What’s happening here is that people are treating this single JSON field as a stand-in for age verification. It is not. If someone wants to meaningfully fight age verification laws then they need to involve themselves in politics instead of social media brigading and harassment campaigns against developers.
In my view, this ‘situation’ exists because it allows hoards of people to appear to be ‘doing something’ without actually doing anything. It’s low effort activisim. People find it much easier to write self-righteous and hyperbolic comments and to get into internet fights than to do the hard work required to affect the politicians and laws that are passed.
On top of this we have the signal boosting effect of trend following, clickbait-driven sites and content creators looking to boost ad revenue by playing up outrage and drama.
I disagree with these laws, but this is not the hill where the battle is being fought. It is a pointless distraction and one that is being used to actively target a person for harm.
Nothing is going to happen on your system unless you choose to let it happen. No software update by any project will ever change this.
The only thing that will change it, and the thing that people should focus on, are the laws in the places where they live.
Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?
Because the real fight is not on the internet or computers.
It’s one battlefront of many, and a fairly significant one. As we’ve become on online society, computer software has come to encode human rights to expression and privacy. Those rights are worth fighting for.
The real fight is on multiple fronts.
What I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to convince people that the only real way to solve this is violent revolution.
Given your lack of history of violent revolution (I’m assuming), I’d guess it’s because you look like a hypocrite for sitting behind a keyboard and telling others to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.
I’ve already spent years of my life in activism (the actual kind where you do work and try to build community, inevitably get added to watch lists, etc) trying to motivate others. I’ve helped with Food Not Bombs, etc. I’ve done a decent amount of “walk the walk” but I’ve also got a life to live. The US is deep into a propaganda hole that I’m afraid is gonna take a long time to climb out of and people have goldfish brains. I don’t really care how I come off to folks on the internet.
lmfao this entire situation is just the average rational person vs big tech lapdogs
I think the discussion we should be having instead is engineering ethics.
I think Dylan’s letter clearly showed he isn’t really involved in “FOSS radical” circles and has the usual engineering mindset (that was described in the Sam Bent blogpost). Not that I personally blame him, engineering schools raise students for this, and the corporate structure further enforces it with the strict hierarchies where you do whatever management orders you to do. What’s important is that there are many devs who clearly aren’t tied into the ethics discussion part of engineering. There’s even research on engineers’ attitudes afaik, and its conclusion was that freshly graduated engineers’ first response was to implement changes without thinking about the ethics part, and after further prompting and discussion, they could be convinced that this change was bad and they need to push back.
I’ll leave a two links here so when people iwsh to read, they know where to find good stuff.
- Constructive Technology Criticism Annotated Syllabus - I know Medium sucks but the scribe.rip copy I saved suffers link rot
- Awesome critical tech reading list - you can just
git cloneit and read it without browser
He didn’t comply, he collaborated. It won’t deter anyone but pro fascist programmers from developing for Linux. Your defence of the indefensible says a lot about you, too.
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.
I don’t care if that optional field exists in the config. Implement age verification if you want, just don’t make it mandatory. My working laptop with Ubuntu has fingerprint verification, which I can disable. I didn’t even know about this functionality before. If this stays in systemd like this, then whatever
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.
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.
Unfortunately appeasement upwards has been taken advantage of over and over.
It’s logical to take a stance of ok what can we do to head off the bigger problem. But the truth is, over authoritative governments and tech businesses will overstep that rational offering. So appeasement needs to stop, and recognising this as the line is already occurring.
I am not gonna wish harm on the guy, but I really don’t have a lot of sympathy for a techbro simp.
Yeah preemptive bootlicking before even getting sued is not a characteristic i love to see in a dev that works on one of the most important pieces of linux software.
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I dunno the exact law, but I’d differentiate based on whether the law in place is bad, or good (in my opinion). Maybe the guys doing the “double standard” also think like this.
So you say that opinion and subjective classification of good or bad is the only valid measurement?
That is the issue with double standard, everyone has their own subjective viewpoint of good or bad, of morality, of which laws to ignore and which to follow. And a lot of really bad things are done all the time in the name of good and moral reasons!
Why make any law at all if only personal, subjectiv morallity matters?
This one is a very old debate, and you are taking my opinion to an extreme. Not that I think it’s particularly offensive or anything.
This question is rhetorical: would you uphold racial segregation laws because they are the law?
There are many takes one what one should do.
I would fight the law itself, not single persons.
I’m not US and my country doesn’t have such a law, can’t fight foreign laws.
I’m not fighting the dev either and I don’t approve harassment, I’m just switching to non-systemd distro, that’s the best message anyone can send against this.
I agree in principle. Thankfully, the law is not “in place” in the US yet, there’s still time to amend, repeal, etc., so we are not in trouble for now.
Ofc, John Brown would disagree with you, but he is extreme by today’s standards.
A better example would be the many people who try to block policemen from evicting people from rented apartments (mostly old/sick people who cannot pay). Ofc, one could pay for one being evicted, but that would just strengthen the landlord.
first off, please announce that the video is from that brody clown so people can not click on that slop; needless to say, I ain’t watched it so I don’t know or care what points was made in it.
second, what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing a strawman argument, false dichotomy, red herring, and all the other logical fallacies in order to posture as a hero or whatever they got going on between their ears - if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
this fucking “contribution” shoulda been shot down like any other troll/bullshit plaguing every other FOSS project beset with ai bots and carma-farming typo-fixers and the like, and if by some mistake their “contribution” was accepted, here’s a chance to reverse it.
cali ain’t the world, which by and large ain’t got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn’t bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could.
that clown of a “contributor” has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don’t care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.
Funny to see someone else with an active distaste for his videos. He sets off predatory alarm bells in my head and feels smarmy to me.
Needless to say, I ain’t watched it so I don’t know or care what points was made in it.
cali ain’t the world, which by and large ain’t got no such idiocy on the books. and if it did, I wouldn’t bootlick my way to submitting a patch to incorporate it; I would, in fact, oppose it any way I could. that clown of a “contributor” has a history of simping for the backwardest ideas, antithetical to FOSS and I don’t care one bit what he has to say on any one topic.
If you refuse to listen to the experience of the person the Linux community has been harassing, then don’t comment.
what OP is doing in OP and his bonehead comments is purposefully pushing … and all the other logical fallacies … if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
Many Lemmy users have explicitly called for violence against Dylan Taylor, and many more have brought forwards implied calls to violence. The Lemmy community is broadly 50:50 on their support for said calls for the violence.
The Lemmy community is broadly 50:50 on their support for said calls for the violence.
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There’s astroturfing. Careful with judging community vibes by obviously votes but also comments.
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There is more to “The Lemmy community” than what’s on display on .ml.
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I’m commenting on your shitty takes. second, if you’ve spent decades (that’s plural yo) on this planet, then you’re familiar with the concept of a hyperbole. a hyperbole is a purposefully exaggerated statement in order to draw attention to the importance of an issue. e.g. I could eat a horse - no you couldn’t, you’re just mildly inconvenienced with what you think is hunger.
consequently, there’s a distinction to be made between actual calls to violence (of which I haven’t seen any on this platform) and vividly voicing disgust and anger.
Excellent. Just having his face out there will discourage him for good, once he gets the backlash.
There is a special guillotine for this wannabe parasite.
A mistake without regret must be punished. They are not kids acting silly. I don’t feel comfortable with a foot on my neck, even when that foot isn’t pressing very hard.
What you are really asking is how far will people go to defend freedom? Look at history, my friend.
He didn’t have to do this. If he wants to do his part to make everyone else’s life worse, then he will have to face the consequences for it.
Nah useful idiots like this deserve the shit they’ll get.
Some more for the “I haven’t seen any calls to violence” crowd.
he should have chilled the fuck out over deepthroating boots as soon as he saw them. Fuck around , find out.
What I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to convince people that the only real way to solve this is violent revolution.
I’m glad to hear he’s getting his shit fucked, maybe he’ll roll back the commit.
EDIT : This fucker is lucky with the amount of hate he’s getting, there’s plenty of people who hate his guts over what he did, and didn’t personally reach out to yell some sense into him
I guess he should try his hardest to get his bootlicking commit rolled back
I don’t wish Dylan harm, and I’m not doing anything to him. I also believe nobody here is sending threats. If you saw the video, you probably noticed that it contained a screenshot from 4chan. 4chan users have been known for terrible behaviour and they are conspiracy-minded fascists, who also oppose this change (others fascists would like this as long as it’s not them being spied on). I’m almost completely sure that they are the ones doing the bullying, not users from here.
I’d prefer if the age verification landscape would be fragmented an unusable, compared to systemd offering it in a consistent manner. Websites will use the offered APIs and will use it for extending fingerprinting. No, fake birth dates won’t save you. Even the disabled canvas API is used for fingerprinting. It just shouldn’t be exposed at all. Not that it matters because every other OS will comply and desktop linux is negligible.
The arguments presented in the video won’t convince anyone who bully people on the internet. They are most often fash and they believe that only power matters. Bullying is exerting power over people, and if they succeed in bullying them into reverting the change, they will be satisfied. Not that I think it will achieve anything, but they do. They follow Carl Schmitt’s teachings.
On “better ways to make a change”: If somebody doesn’t live in the US, and lives in sort of a dictatorship, they can neither affect murican lawmaking nor do their govt listen to anyone other than a few. If this age attestation/verification shit comes into place, their only choice here would be to go and not install systemd-userdb (or use linux without systemd). The disabled API would probably break even more websites than disabling 3rd party javascript. Their govt could also use the fingerprinting to spy more on citizens (they prolly already do).
As a thought experiment: please recommend them a better way than bullying. No, not living in a shithole country is not an option. No, they don’t have the spare money to found/donate to an existing org that fights against this. Also, companies pushing this would just outspend them.
There’s also the aspect of corporate influence over linux. It directs changes in order to further business interest over normal users’ interests. Personally, I prefer companies be out of linux and would accept lower-quality things. But also, I think the ones most hurt by these laws are the system integrators (mentioned in the video), who actually need to do things that align with normal users’ interests.
On the parental control thing: yes, age things could be used for it, but the parents know better than the computer, and user settings would be preferable (for example, kid should be able to this and that program, open this site, but not others). I think it shouldn’t be the websites who decide. Yes, parenting takes a lot of time, but we can’t substitute it with automatated fence-building.
Edit: elaborate on "fascists.
As a thought experiment: please recommend them a better way than bullying
We could:
- reject the PR: no, because it’s already accepted by the lead.
- try to argue with the project maintainers: already failed. This is systemd we’re talking about. They are used to just plowing on regardless of what the wider community thinks.
- reject the software: systemd is fundamental to a lot of systems, so this is very painful.
It’s not hard to see why people have resorted to bullying. It’s not right, but there’s no way to make your voice heard. OSS development is not a democracy. It’s a do-ocracy. Those that d"do" dictate. Fine when the developer is aligned with the users. Chaos otherwise.
You missed this option:
- Ignore the feature and don’t use it.
systemd is quite modular. For example, if you abhor systemd-resolved (not at unreasonable stance) it’s NBD to disable it.
Recently (<1 year?) I frequently see the notion that software is “tainted” by having been touched by Bad. I find this a bit silly. Especially if it’s from a user who’s not even spending time in the codebase.
If the law creates this new API, nobody will be able to get away without leaking PII to the web (I think it will have a javascript API). 1970 jan 1 identifies *nix users, 1900 jan 1, even an “unset” will leak info on people, etc. entropy and shit. Websites will also try to use the API. One could set the function to crash JS, or disable all JS, but that already breaks 90% of the web. One could also: either not install userdb (like I do), or install a non-systemd linux, but those still will leak “unset” or “API disabled”.
There’s no getting away from this, it really is the law that we should push back against. Unfortunately it’s a fight currently only Americans and Brazilians can participate in properly. Donations won’t work well, govts these days often clamp down on NGOs because they often get money internationally, and therefore, they are “foreign interference” etc.
I also believe nobody here is sending threats.
I wouldn’t be so sure of your tribe. 19 users so far upvoted a comment with among other concerning bits:
if you’re anti this bullshit “law” then you are also pro physically harming poor FOSS “contributors”.
A good response. Informative, mature, and well thought out.
I don’t wish Dylan harm, and I’m not doing anything to him. I also believe nobody here is sending threats.
True, but publicly wishing ill upon someone for something as trivial as this (i.e. something with zero basis in the real world) is extremely toxic. The odds are slim he’d ever be seen on Lemmy, saying the kinds of things some people here have been saying publicly demonstrates a tremendous lack of empathy and maturity. And that this community is so accepting of those kinds of words is a real problem.
There’s also the Sam Bent article, that was posted here on Lemmy. That’s probably the most directly harmful thing someone’s done. By sharing that article it’s possible someone here was inspired to harass him, and even though nobody probably did the risk is non-zero.
I never thought the PR was a big deal to begin with. That’s sad to hear that he’s receiving death threats. Can whoever’s doing that chill the fuck out?
he should have chilled the fuck out over deepthroating boots as soon as he saw them. Fuck around , find out.
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.
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.
[the linux kernel developers group] bent over backwards to comply with the american government’s overreach when they kicked out russian developers.
I though that was mostly due to Linus being a typical Russia-hating Finn, but I never investigated.
i also wouldn’t put this past him given the reactionary tendencies he’s demonstrated in the past; but i suspect that a threat of non-compliance == treason from the federal government probably had a bigger impact.
and if you’ve ever had the displeasure of working for the federal government; you’ll hear horror stories of how capricious and draconian the selective enforcement of treason can be.
On a completely unrelated, off-topic note. Here is the same person talking about Google’s new “advanced workflow” for “sideloading apps” on Android.
The title of his blog post is “Google’s New Android Sideloading Flow Is a Fair Trade”…Figures.
You mention the title but not the content of the essay. Did you read it?
TL;DR is that he says his initial reaction was “frustration” but then he goes on to parrot everything Google said to justify this.
For example,
57% of adults worldwide experienced a scam in 2025
It is to protect people from scammers. It isn’t aimed at power users (Sounds very much like “It is to protect the children. This isn’t aimed at power users”).
There is no mention of https://keepandroidopen.org/ and what it means for developers of free and open android applications.
There is no mention of statements made by developers of applications like F-droid, Obtainium and Newpipe who have openly said that they do not agree with this step from Google.
There is no mention of how this can potentially demotivate individual android app developers and drive them away from the platform entirely (here is an example of this).
There is also no mention of how most of these malware, adware and nagware infested apps used by scammers are ironically on Google’s own Play Store.
Other that that, no. I’m sure I did not read the content of his essay carefully enough. More importantly, my opinion doesn’t matter. I’m just a reactionary idiot. But I wonder what the developers of those free and open source applications on F-droid, applications that cannot be installed via the Play Store (but their scammy fake versions can be), will react to this being called a “fair trade”.
Wow. Thanks for clearing that up. That was the first time I heard about the “advanced flow” and the criticism surrounding it.
Sure seems like a useful idiot at best.
57% of adults worldwide experienced a scam in 2025
Sure. I experienced a scam and I told them to “fuck off”.
That’s not 57% fell for a scam, or 57% of android users got scammed by “side loaded” software. It’s cherry picking a stat just justify a monopolistic practice.
Typical it doesn’t effect me so why are they doing it. You said your selff 57% is a huge number. And they hopefully can reduce that. People on here secerly underestimate the average person let alone the half of the people who are below average.
Why so many fucking bootlickers???
There is so many in the world it is actually crazy
