Be careful now! His coworkers will act most silently.
I still don’t understand why it needs to be implemented as part of systemd, and not - say - as a service. Or, if we want to “go with” the law - make it a kernel module, which sounds more impressive (“we are complying at the kernel level!”) but in practice so much easier to opt out of.
Then he said Arch Linux should implement it anyway because the law requires it. archinstall PR #4290
Well, it’s not “the law”, it’s your local law. To most people on the planet, it doesn’t apply any more than for example North Korea’s laws. As far as I can find, Arch Linux is not owned by a foundation or similar legal entity (i.e. which could have been located in California), but the lead developer appears to live in Germany.
I mean they kidnapped maduro and are trying him under new york law so…
So… if the law interferes with your goals, apparently it is now perfectly fine to just ignore it.
That seems to be the approach the US government is taking.
I mean yes, the dems have been breathlessly going on about how that thing that Trump’s doing is illegal but nothing seems to happen. There is no opposition at all
Germany has a similar law already active
§12 Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag
(1) Anbieter von Betriebssystemen, die von Kindern und Jugendlichen üblicherweise genutzt werden im Sinne des § 16 Abs. 1 Satz 3 Nr. 6, stellen sicher, dass ihre Betriebssysteme über eine den nachfolgenden Absätzen entsprechende Jugendschutzvorrichtung verfügen. Passt ein Dritter die vom Anbieter des Betriebssystems bereitgestellte Jugendschutzvorrichtung an, besteht die Pflicht aus Satz 1 insoweit bei diesem Dritten.
(3) In der Jugendschutzvorrichtung muss eine Altersangabe eingestellt werden können
But yes, neither such laws nor the implementation into systemd is in any way positive and should be fought
Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag
Is that a single word? O_O
Yes!, and german words can even get bigger!
to all y’all with the “it’s just a text field”: what if the field is “race”? “sexual orientation”? “jerks_off_to”? what the fuck has a system managing daemon got to do with any of that? and why would you preemptively put it in there without even a pretense of a fight?
fuck you make us! make linux illegal, in Cali of all places. guess how long that will last?
Yeah, scary.
What about some other scary fields like:
- Real Name
- Office Address
- Office number
- Office telephone number
- Home telephone number
- external e-mail address
I mean if those fields were stored, could you imagine the danger that Linux users would be in?
You don’t have to imagine, because those fields have been stored in UNIX/Linux since 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
Those are also entirely optional and not having them filled in doesn’t cause other software to stop doing what the user wants.
The same with the birthDate field.
… unless someone merges a PR making it required, which is the discussion of this thread.
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Stored “because law”, right?
Who cares why it is stored, these fields exist for every user in every Linux system and they have existed for decades.
Either birthDate the field is dangerous or it isn’t. If it is, how?
It is no different than data fields that ask for way more identifiable and personal information such as Real Name and Office number which have, again, existed for decades without issue.
I care. One thing is “you know, fields with this name have been around since before you were born”, another thing is “some idiots passed the law half the globe away, now we are preparing your system to comply. Someone has to ©”. The field is not the danger, the thinking, attitude and act is
Edit: some local law, for fuck’s sake
Half a world away where do you live since this is happening everywhere. To be half a world away from any place doing this would be hard.
That’s a fair argument.
Is it fair to say: The field is benign but there is contention about if it should be added or not and users of the software are concerned that their voices were not heard on the issue. That can be handled in the normal project framework, perhaps by suggesting a publicly stated policy about these issues around legal compliance so the community can determine if they want to support the project or not.
My argument is that I don’t think that the damage that was done justifies the hitpiece in the OP which is, almost literally, painting a target on the developer with the mugshot photograph and loaded language.
So, if you’re not one of the people then we’re having different conversations. In that conversation, I do agree with what you just said. I’d like to see the very large projects, which affect a lot of users, such as systemd, have a more formal way to accept public comment and respond on contentious changes and feature requests.
Is it fair to say: The field is benign
It is benign if it is optional, remains 100% local and under the user’s control and doesn’t prevent other software from functioning as expected.
You must be off by a decade. Your reference mentions no OS and Unic was developed around 1970.
Your reference mentions no OS
This whole article/blog post reads as “How dare this person follow the law. ;(”
I really don’t understand the pushback on this one person for submitting the change request. When it is the lawmaker that put this law into place that we should be criticizing. The post repeatedly uses how the contributer said that the change was “hilariously pointless and ineffective.” As some sort of gotcha as to why the merge should not have been accepted but does not explain why the maintainers should not follow the law other than “law bad”.
It also consistently calls out the various peoples’ places of work and experience as some sort of boogeyman for why they should not be allowed to contribute to open source. If these people were universally accepted to be bad actors in the community then they would not be accepted as reviewers for these projects. This just attacks their character to try to prove a point.
Let’s just ignore whether there’s any moral or ethical arguments about legal compliance: What law is this man complying with? This is not a law that governs him. He is volunteering, and not compelled. There is no sanctity of law at play here.
Are you implying that only people who are affected by something are allowed to contribute to open source projects? If this were some nobody developer in California would that really make you any more likely to accept that this merge request is okay?
There’s no subtext. This man has no obligation to this law, so “How dare this person follow the law. ;(” isn’t relevant. This man is not following a law, he is simply going about his day. He is volunteering, and not compelled. There is no sanctity of law at play here.
But, to play ball, yes. If a person who would otherwise receive punishment were to do this, I would take that into account. That is not the case here.
There is a special guillotine for this wannabe parasite.
A mistake without regret must be punished. They are not kids acting silly. I don’t feel comfortable with a foot on my neck, even when that foot isn’t pressing very hard.
Someone add the default to 1/1/1970
He didn’t just try. He succeeded in doing so. His pull request was merged into systemd and will land into your distro eventually (if it is systemd-based).
There are distros free of systemd, like Devuan, based on Debian.
There are distros free of systemd, like Devuan, based on Debian.
AntiX, Artix, Guix System and a few others
Gentoo has 5 different init systems
systemd already stores your realName and location. It has stored that information since the beginning.
There is nothing that birthDate will tell a person that they can’t find out using your realName and location.
Please stop with the personal attacks on open source maintainers.
Developers are not a protected class. They do not get special social protections when they do ignorant things.
The key phrase is Personal Attack.
If the law was the only thing stopping you doing that, it reflects on you.
Any criticism should be directed primarily at the laws, not the person who suggested adding a birthdate field to the user.json.
Open source is dependent on volunteers contributing their time. The developers at SystemD have been receiving death threats over this. This article includes his name, face, workplace. I know that information is publicly available but the Geoguessr experts aren’t the people we need to worry about.
So maybe next time when someone sees a pull-request like this, they think before merging it?
*provided no one gets hurt. I sympathise with the uproar, but physically hurting the guy is definitely too much
He did not just suggest it. He went on and implemented it. All while the community was telling him “we don’t want this”, “stop with this” – look at the comments on GitHub. Yet he neglected all this feedback.
As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right? If you go ahead while the community is telling you “we don’t want this”, then whom are you working for?
As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right?
- They don’t work for anyone.
- Even if they did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be for you.
- Even if they did work for you, they are under no obligation to even think about breaking the law for you.
Of course there are no obligations and he’s’free to do as he pleases. Likewise, the community or I are under no obligations of not criticizing him for what he chose to do.
This isn’t criticism.
Taking a person, photoshopping their picture to look like a dossier on a criminal and writing a hit piece which includes all of their publicly available information is doxxing for the purpose of harassment.
Lemmy is a small community, read some of the comments in this post and you’ll see people using violent language, calling him a traitor, etc.
I didn’t even have to go far to find an example, literally the comment under my reply:
https://lemmy.world/post/44550728/22802099
A mistake without regret must be punished. They are not kids acting silly. I don’t feel comfortable with a foot on my neck, even when that foot isn’t pressing very hard.
Expand that to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit (where this exact article is also posted) and the chances of some crazy person going out and doing harm to this man increases.
This is why public doxxing is wrong and anyone participating in this is morally corrupt.
Nah I don’t buy it. Ain’t no way this mf is 6’4".
Dylan is a lowlife fucking looser
So lennart personally blocked the revert? Fucking on-brand for all he’s wrecked in Linux.
Is he still working at Microsoft, or was he just too special for them too?
Is it just me using Brave or the site also shows you crypto prices for no apparent reason?
I mean, the idea that this even needs to be asked means your browser is dogshit.
The site is using clickbait and doxxing to drive ad revenue.
The fact that they’re also pushing scam crypto is pretty on brand for these kinds of scumbags.
I’ve used Brave in the past, and it never showed me crypto prices at any time. But I did make sure all the that crap was turned off.
Nobody paid him to do this. He’s a cloud engineer who read the law and decided someone needed to implement it.
Well, how do you know that?
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