- 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.
Yes, this is bad. People should not be targeted because of what they wrote.
On a personal level.
Yeah, that would be bad. Kind of like a targeted harassment campaign of a person because of what they wrote.
It’s one thing to be against age verification or software that does age verification or platforms that require age verification. That isn’t what is happening here.
That fight is political, this is an engineering problem.
You could argue that this enables age verification, it doesn’t. Age verification software can exist without this field, it could store your birthdate in .config/EvilAgeVerificationApp/userinfo.txt.
The field is an optional entry, systemd doesn’t require it or verify it. It is simply the most logical place, from an engineering perspective, to store the data.