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The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux (www.sambent.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 45 points 5 months ago (21 children)

What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you'd think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don't like it I'm sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one's freedom is being oppressed here.

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  • [–] 31 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    What a pointless drama article this is.

    Yep. The crypto ticker at the bottom of the page is the cherry on top!

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    It's literally an optional birthDate field in a place where there's already realName, emailAddress, and location. If you're concerned about privacy, maybe don't expose your real name, email, and location.

    And it's not even fucking installed everywhere:

    $ userdbctl
Command 'userdbctl' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install systemd-userdbd

    Anybody who is calling this age verification is actively lying to you!

    This Sam Bent guy should fucking get bent.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    It's brigading harassment on a volunteer dev, the post should be nuked this is just doxxing for ad revenue... disgusting

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  • [–] 17 points 5 months ago (12 children)

    That isn't really the point. All this nonsense happened without community discussion beforehand.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    Who are the community employing? Why do they need consulting before code changes are made?

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  • [–] -3 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    Your comment is nonsense.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

    I think what ze's saying is https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/ . the nature of open source—atl in accord with the hacker ethic—is that everything is just a passion project, there is no responsibility to not make bad decisions, and bad decisions result in decreased adoption and lost trust. after all, open source has always been about making a new alternative because existing solutions are bad.

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  • [–] -3 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    So we aren't supposed to talk about or react to said bad decisions? Come on.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago*

    nah as an anarchist i am against silence. i'm just saying that in our capitalist society open source maintainers do not in fact have responsibility to the community, only to their market share, and this works slightly less dysfunctionally than proprietary because come what may the opposition may fork it. but that and the transparency and the ability to volunteer your labor for them are the only things that open source does guarantee.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    So we aren’t supposed to talk about or react to said bad decisions? Come on.

    Do you want to post your real name and place of work online for everyone to see or do you understand why that kind of action is dangerous and wrong?

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    What in the fascist fuck are you talking about

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    This thread isn't a discussion about a bad decision.

    Discussions don't start with putting the developer in a mug shot and posting all of his personal details.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    My OS should have no details on me besides the account name which didn't necessarily correspond to my real name.

    It does have some old fields for location etc but those stem from the times of massive multi user systems.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they're all optional.

    Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    No Linux as such was not, by the time Linux got popular the big multiuser systems were on their way out. I still worked on those in college. But they were SGI, HP-UX and Sequent. Especially the latter were huge systems.

    But these fields were just a clone of what was in the original Unix systems.

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