- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
Don’t collaborate with fascists.
systemd maintainers rolling over and complying in advance somehow isn’t even that surprising.
I don’t get the “complying in advance” argument here. What would be an appropriate date for something like this to be accepted?
Well, the law doesn’t come into effect until Jan 1st 2027, so you could delay until then at the latest. Or you wait a bit longer to see what the enforcement looks like and make the companies/politicians at least sweat a bit from any potential fallout. With GDPR some companies took a long time of dragging their feet to become compliant (partially because initial enforcement was lenient to give them time).
Right. I thin you are ignoring some complexity here. This developer added a field to store some optional data in systemd. That code needs to be tested, reviewed, debated, and eventually needs to be merged in. Those merges, at least with large projects, don’t typically get added directly to main they get added to a release branch. That release branch then needs to be completed and merged where it will then be packaged. Then different distributions/installers need to add that field as a requirement to their code which typically goes through the same process. Then all those changes need to be packaged for release by the distros themselves.
So I’ll ask again. Assuming that distros do not want to risk being fined and financially ruined. What is a appropriate time before January 1st 2027 to open this pull request in systemd?
This would also assume that we would like to propose a solution (for the data storage) early enough that distros do not all come up with their own implementations and leave PII strewn across the system.
Never. Let shit hit the fan if it has to. Fight back instead of swallowing the whole boot.
Legitimately the way various porn sites addressed similar laws is the way to go. Verification required in this state? “Well we’re no longer serving this state’s traffic at all, and conveniently here’s the contact info of the government officials to blame, enjoy!”
Hi. Are you a maintainer of one of the distros that might be affected by this law? If you aren’t then you have no standing to blindly tell them that they should not follow the law and risk fines that would ruin the funding for their project(s).
Bringing up porn sites is a false equivalency. Many of these laws do not require verification of ID or face scans as some are incorrectly claiming. They require a birthdate be entered during installation. The laws surrounding porn sites required 3rd party age verification which many of these sites said would not only crater their traffic from these states but also introduce a privacy nightmare which would also work against their business interests.
I imagine it feels quite righteous to drop maxims like this. I too am reminded everyday how glad I am not to have to live in a fascist state.
That said I think this sort of superficial dismissal is really unhelpful.
I think the vast majority of Linux users will agree we don’t want to have to work with these laws but the reality is that we do. Far better we focus our efforts on minimising harm and promoting alternative mechanisms (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs).
Further I fear this righteousness actually serves to foster a toxic culture in the free software movement. And do you know what we call belligerent people who want to stifle dissent? Fascists!