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.
Relatively inconsequential law? Relative to what?
It may be inconsequential in a literal sense if the law isn’t enforced meaningfully, which is probably pretty likely. I don’t really care what California law says and I doubt they’ll try to convince me.
The law says an OS needs to have a way of entering a birth date.
Not the correct birth date, it doesn’t need to allow checking it. Just any date.
That’s inconsequential relative to basically everything else.
Death threats.
Also, basically anything the Trump administration has done.
Death threats are far beyond unacceptable, but it’s naive to think this policy is without consequence. It can take as few as 3 non-personal pieces of information (examples of personal: name, phone number, street address, SSN) to uniquely identify someone. Say the kind of car you drive, your employer, and your hair color. Together those are form a strong identifier, but now add age BY DEFAULT. Even a weak set becomes unique.
That is incredibly consequential. You could be implicated in a crime you didn’t commit, protesting becomes impossible, and everything you do or say will ALWAYS follow you. The balance between citizen and government becomes irrevesibly skewed. Just because your computer will volunteer your age.
This issue should be the issue we care about the most.