“It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.

“But it’s the law!”

Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.

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.

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?

2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright

2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection

In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act didn't become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(

I have read the git thread related to the merge request.

I don't see what's the big deal. You have a user model that already contain fields like user's full name, location, ... among others and all this developer did was adding yet another optional field called date of birth.

This does nothing to verify user's age and enforce nothing. They've stressed that repeatedly in the comments.

What that does is making it easy for a Linux distro to store user's birthday - should they wish to do so - and making that bit of info accessible to running apps so that each app can do what it wants with it.

User's fullname and location are already there which are also optional so what's the big deal?

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.

Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being "just json" considering they're already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with. Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).

Collaborator

Dylan is a lowlife fucking looser

I disagree with age verification as well, but attacking a person like this is gross.

This article is all but brigading people into harassing this guy.

Petition to name the inevitable fork of this "SystemFree"

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?

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.

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.

Fucking bootlicker

Ah the great betrayer. The snake in the garden. The enemy within the gates. That fucking cunt.

Is there an Arch fork that is not implementing this shit or do I have to go non systemd now? Because this BS is not going on any of my machines.

Genuine question, don’t we always say that we can change anything in the system on open source software like Linux and systemd etc? What’s stopping any of us from removing this age verification thing? Apps may break, true, but I’m sure there will be many one line scripts that replace that age verification with something that feeds it fake data?