Software changes for compliance with age-verification laws are being pushed a bit everywhere in Linux-development; for example:

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.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    21 hours ago

    No, I disagree.

    It is not one person’s doing. That is the deflection.

    I will not downplay the effect of this by saying they are the only one involved. Every maintainer so far that has locked or approved any changes that they did are equally at fault here. In fact, one of those linked articles even stated that the primary reason they locked it is because they didn’t like the amount of coverage it got. This is a failure on the community as a whole, not the individual.

    edit for clarification: By failure, I’m talking more on projects that are humoring it and actually going through with it without considering the potential side effects of just blanket applying that.

    Currently considering that a handful of these are locked or posted as we don’t know if we’re going to be doing this yet, I haven’t quite put them in that same sector yet, but it’s rapidly approaching it.