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.

  • ejs@piefed.socialEnglish
    13·
    3 days ago

    I’m still not convinced there is a direct casual link between the merged attestation and some future surveillance. Your speculation that this is some deliberate political strategy for some gradual escalation from attestation to surveillance is not logical evidence, but some belief you have, which holds no weight in an argument; it stands that you have no concrete evidence against your logic being a slippery slope fallacy.

    You did concede to my argument by admitting “by itself the attestation is pointless.” Good to know we agree that there is outrage over nothing.

    By saying “PR vs merge is a moot point”, you’re running away from a logical/technical debate by being dismissive; you are openly stating you don’t care how the mechanics of these foss projects actually work. Again, you can have a speculative opinion, but that is not a logical argument.

    When you argue parents should be using OS parental controls, you do know that that’s exactly what the systemd age attestation PR is building, right? It seems you’re fighting against the very infrastructure needed for your preferred solution.

    Finally, you conflate local infrastructure with cloud APIs (vindicating my claim that people opposing this are ignorant to the actual code being merged): Systemd is a local init system. Connecting the local userdb age integer to an external, network reliant govt API is a monumental leap in implementation and architecture, not a simple “add this API” patch that can be quietly slipped in without the entire foss community noticing and revolting. The attestation PR, for instance, had around 200 comments, of back and fourth refining of implementation and discussion, before merge.