we like to think of FOSS as some sort of anarchist collective°. it never has been.

it's run by a series of people with absolute power, for the most part. the benefit is that it's a lot of tiny dictators rather than a few big ones; that in theory anyone can become one, you don't need to be rich; and that these dictators tend to have technical knowledge.

but they can still be arseholes.

° i mean, we might not CALL it that.

(disclaimer: IANALAIDEPOOTV)

One remark and one comment:

Remark: the title says "tried to", the article says did -- and Poettering blocked a revert.

Comment: in countries where the GDPR applies, the feature appears contrary to article 5 as overbroad, even probably purposeless *per se* ; maybe also contrary to recent European decisions against generalized citizen data collection, too.

@Khrys

I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an idea to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies.

So I don't really see the problem here.

'He read the law, took it at face value, and started writing code. The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious: an engineer who treats compliance as engineering, who sees a legal requirement the way he sees a technical specification, and will implement whatever the spec says regardless of who wrote the spec or why.'

Zealot. The word is Zealot. His god spoke and he responded.

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

NO, THE LASTING DAMAGE IS ACCEPTING INTRODUCTION AND USAGE OF OF SYSTEMD.

Paid for by IBM and later Microsoft to dominate (destroy) Linux

So, tl;dr, someone added an age field, and the trolls went crazy?
And now everybody hates everybody, and each side is calling the other one "zealot" with religious fervor?

Just another day in toxicland, I guess. 🤷

cyberfascism at play..

infosec.space/@kkarhan/1162670…

@nblr @doingfedtime What kind of bullshit hit piece is this?

We’re now blaming developers for contributing to FOSS projects?

Great job everyone, you can be really proud of yourselves! 👏 /s

Too old for Linux

I think that's a rock opera, isn't it?

Also, #fuckedCompany

" .... name is Dylan M. Taylor, a Senior DevOps Engineer at Credit Genie, a Khosla Ventures-backed fintech startup in Durham, North Carolina."

needlessly dramatic for what was an entirely unsurprising development. wake me up if they do anything beyond a glorified text field, something almost all other OSs have had for decades.

I mean I agree that the sentiment is bad. but do we need the entire linux community to explode over this? hardly

let’s be completely honest here. The choices are:

- Non compliance resulting in everyone complaining that your device is “broken”
- Non compliance (this option)
- Full compliance with outside verification (a horrible option)

If a mandated API is made called, then easiest option is just to return “adult” and move on, rather than the millions of people complaining that “it doesn’t work”

I really don’t get what the point of this hit piece is.

@jonathankoren The point is that you don’t just give away your freedom because it’s easier. You *at least* say ‘fuck you, make me’ first.

There are way more people for who this is NOT law than for who it IS. So much for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

@Remember Remember 7th November @jonathankoren™ @Khrys

This is not giving away your freedom.