The salient fact is that this change was made in order to “comply in advance” with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that’s not okay!
On an individual level, absolutely do not comply in advance with fucked up laws.
But as a technical professional working in regulated industries, you have to try to predict future legislation to remain compliant and permit your place of work to continue operating. Anything computer or network related takes time to update, and if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down. It’s far better to be proactive and ensure that your organization is compliant with future legislation than it is to sit on your hands because you don’t like this new change and then have to scramble to implement it at the 11th hour before your organization becomes noncompliant and may be forced to pause operating business. That’s literally your job if you are, say, a SystemD developer working for RedHat/IBM
This ire needs to be directed towards your local politicians (whether or not such age verification laws are in the process of being passed!), not towards career developers who happen to work on projects you care about
I’d agree with you, except that it’s clear that the political systems we live under are flawed/non-functional. Non-compliance may be our next best shot at stopping these laws from getting any more traction.
It’s clear to me with the stance that the dev that closed the revert pull request that they aren’t willing to form any resistance to these types of changes. Actually, the revert pull request stated that their request was due to a number of people discussing the matter and they ultimately decided that there could be harm inflicted, yet the dev ‘poettering’ decided to supercede this decision. Not only is this the first crack in a hold-the-line situation with other major FOSS projects refusing to make the change but also shows their hand at how they stance themselves politically.
…if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down.
In theory, but also we just don’t hear of this actually happening to organizations very much. Why? (I could be wrong, I don’t constantly dig through news to find instances of this happening.)
Everything from tax issues to personal data retention and protection policy gets overlooked all the time, with very real consequences, and we don’t hear of those organizations getting “taken down” for it. (Like when Equifax lost all our Pii and were just like ‘whoops.’ They’re still forcibly embedded in our lives anyway.)
Maybe this would get used to bring down a tiny small business if it caught legal attention, but anything larger could likely shrug it off.
Organizations don’t seem to bother with such inconveniences unless it’s actively enforced and audited. Is California really going to do that with this? Seems like it’d be prohibitively expensive.
So it’s just a little weird to me when legislation is proposed to infringe on end-users and suddenly there’s this huge rush to “get compliant” ahead of time. It seems like a lot less IT due diligence and more virtue-signaling agreeance with totalitarian politics.
On an individual level, absolutely do not comply in advance with fucked up laws.
But as a technical professional working in regulated industries, you have to try to predict future legislation to remain compliant and permit your place of work to continue operating. Anything computer or network related takes time to update, and if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down. It’s far better to be proactive and ensure that your organization is compliant with future legislation than it is to sit on your hands because you don’t like this new change and then have to scramble to implement it at the 11th hour before your organization becomes noncompliant and may be forced to pause operating business. That’s literally your job if you are, say, a SystemD developer working for RedHat/IBM
This ire needs to be directed towards your local politicians (whether or not such age verification laws are in the process of being passed!), not towards career developers who happen to work on projects you care about
Or we could direct the ire at both. There’s no shortage of ire here.
I’d agree with you, except that it’s clear that the political systems we live under are flawed/non-functional. Non-compliance may be our next best shot at stopping these laws from getting any more traction.
It’s clear to me with the stance that the dev that closed the revert pull request that they aren’t willing to form any resistance to these types of changes. Actually, the revert pull request stated that their request was due to a number of people discussing the matter and they ultimately decided that there could be harm inflicted, yet the dev ‘poettering’ decided to supercede this decision. Not only is this the first crack in a hold-the-line situation with other major FOSS projects refusing to make the change but also shows their hand at how they stance themselves politically.
In theory, but also we just don’t hear of this actually happening to organizations very much. Why? (I could be wrong, I don’t constantly dig through news to find instances of this happening.)
Everything from tax issues to personal data retention and protection policy gets overlooked all the time, with very real consequences, and we don’t hear of those organizations getting “taken down” for it. (Like when Equifax lost all our Pii and were just like ‘whoops.’ They’re still forcibly embedded in our lives anyway.)
Maybe this would get used to bring down a tiny small business if it caught legal attention, but anything larger could likely shrug it off.
Organizations don’t seem to bother with such inconveniences unless it’s actively enforced and audited. Is California really going to do that with this? Seems like it’d be prohibitively expensive.
So it’s just a little weird to me when legislation is proposed to infringe on end-users and suddenly there’s this huge rush to “get compliant” ahead of time. It seems like a lot less IT due diligence and more virtue-signaling agreeance with totalitarian politics.