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.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
    21·
    11 hours ago

    Who gets to decide what software should and should not be allowed to exist?

    If someone wanted to store a birthDate (and, evidence exists to say that they do) then the most logical place to store that user detail is with all of the other user details… in systemd.

    You can choose what you put on your system, that’s the Free in FOSS. But, you cannot choose what other people put on their systems.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      3·
      9 hours ago

      Its not leaving a lot of choice if it’s part of systemd and I’d wager far more people do not want this than were asking for it. There’s no benefit to it except for the government and corporations that want your data.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        11·
        9 hours ago

        The field doesn’t do anything by itself. There is zero harm inflicted on people using systemd. There are probably lots of features of systemd that you don’t want or use and the entire negative effect that you suffer is a few megabytes less free storage space.

        The only way the field would be used is if a person decided to use a different piece of software that wants a birthdate. If they don’t choose to install such a program then the field is no more a danger than the realName or location fields. They have scary sounding labels but do absolutely nothing unless the user chooses to use them.