Software changes for compliance with age-verification laws are being pushed a bit everywhere in Linux-development; for example:
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In Systemd, already merged.
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In xdg.desktop.portal (a portal frontend service for Flatpak and other desktop containment frameworks), still open.
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In Arch Linux, still open.
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In Freedesktop.org, still open.
It’s interesting that it’s the same small group of people behind these pull requests, and that discussion threads in them have been locked owing to a great amount of negative criticisms.
They say “we have to comply with the law”. Which also means that if “the law” in the future will require proper verification, handling to 3rd-parties, or whatnot, then they will comply.
Well, it’s their right to. They don’t owe anything to anyone, and are under no obligation to report to users or to the community, nor to pay heed to anybody’s wishes.
If things proceed in this direction, we users may at some point have to choose between privacy-friendly Linux distributions or legal Linux distributions. People who, like me, are worried, need to start thinking about concrete actions to take before it’s too late: where to develop such distros? which channels to download and distribute them from? And so on. (And of course, more generally we need to write and protest to politicians, organize protest marches, go on strike, refuse to comply…)
It’s good to remind to those who keep on repeating the words “legal” and “illegal” that for example Nelson Mandela was, technically speaking, a criminal who did and promoted illegal activity. This happens when laws become immoral.
Don’t comply in advance, that’s what I say. Unfortunately, that’s what systemd is doing, and what archinstall, xdg-desktop-portal, and Freedesktop.org are on the verge of doing.
For the vast majority of people who don’t live in California, including myself, California law can go fly a kite.
Doesn’t the law expect “Operating Systems” to do this? I feel like everyone should point fingers and lean on bureaucracy. Systemd should say “well don’t look at us, we’re not an operating system, we’re just an init and services system”, and Linux says “well we’re just a kernel, usermode does whatever it wants”, and Debian says “well we’re just a distro, we didn’t write any of the packages we just stick them together.”
If the tech illiterate idiots who wrote the poorly thought out law can’t figure out who to ask, maybe they’ll do their due diligence next time.