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.

  • HereIAm@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Well, the law doesn’t come into effect until Jan 1st 2027, so you could delay until then at the latest. Or you wait a bit longer to see what the enforcement looks like and make the companies/politicians at least sweat a bit from any potential fallout. With GDPR some companies took a long time of dragging their feet to become compliant (partially because initial enforcement was lenient to give them time).

    • Archr@lemmy.world
      21·
      1 hour ago

      Right. I thin you are ignoring some complexity here. This developer added a field to store some optional data in systemd. That code needs to be tested, reviewed, debated, and eventually needs to be merged in. Those merges, at least with large projects, don’t typically get added directly to main they get added to a release branch. That release branch then needs to be completed and merged where it will then be packaged. Then different distributions/installers need to add that field as a requirement to their code which typically goes through the same process. Then all those changes need to be packaged for release by the distros themselves.

      So I’ll ask again. Assuming that distros do not want to risk being fined and financially ruined. What is a appropriate time before January 1st 2027 to open this pull request in systemd?

      This would also assume that we would like to propose a solution (for the data storage) early enough that distros do not all come up with their own implementations and leave PII strewn across the system.