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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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[–] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

He got a huge amount of criticisms and negative comments from the community while he was working on this on GitHub; look at the comment thread of his implementation on GitHub. Essentially the community was telling him "we don't want this". And who are you working for in a FOSS project, if not for the community? Yet he disregarded the comments and went on.

On top of this, he appeared out of the blue with this implementation. He had not made any pull requests to this git before now. Nobody had assigned this task to him.

So the situation is not that this is some employee who was asked to implement something, and did it without knowing what the feedback would have been.

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  • [+] -7 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Spreading his face around doctored as if it were a mugshot in a community where people are calling him a traitor and other things is a recipe for someone to be hurt or killed.

    This thread isn't a community discussion about implementing a feature, it's people trying to whip up a mob to attack a person. It doesn't matter how much you dislike the field name he added to a JSON document, you don't stir up a mob that can lead to people getting hurt.

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

    In principle I agree with you, pacific discussion and democracy should be the way to go. But it seems that "discussion" doesn't lead anywhere these times. Politicians do whatever they like (or what lobbies tell them to do), without checking if the majority of the population really agree with some decisions. A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the "mob" does at some point: they don't care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.

    I fear that riots will start on a larger scale. Even if the context today is different, the situation reminds me somewhat of what happened with the 1981 riots in Toxteth, in Brixton, and other previous riots. Unjust or misused laws; deafness of authorities about discontent; innocent and not-so-innocent people getting hurt.

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

    A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.

    It's pretty cliche but: Two wrongs don't make a right.

    In the FOSS world, there are many ways to handle this kind of situation. A mob-led harassment campaign is not one of them.

    If you disagree with how a project is going then you can fork it. LibreOffice disagreed with the direction of OpenOffice and forked it, NextCloud and OwnCloud forked from one another when there was major disagreement.

    At no point should volunteer developers have their face plastered on a mugshot and their personal information blasted to a mob of angry people.

    Be angry at the politicians and mega corporations who are voting and funding these initiatives, not the developers who are caught in the middle.

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