Go away with your doomer memes.

You know what else won’t work, performative cynicism without any actual contribution.

The USA and especially specific states shouldn’t have this much pull especially over open source community driven projects in my opinion.

I completely agree.

I hope we see a bigger push for FOSS software in the EU as they try to reduce their dependency on US tech companies. If more countries treat software like we treat science where everyone contributes and everyone benefits then we’ll all be better off.

You control what you install on your pc and I’d be willing to bet that whatever open source OS it is, probably uses Systemd.

They have set this up in a way that yes, right now at 11:21pm UTC on March 24th it isn’t being enforced or required.

It is using systemd, yes. It could be using openRC, sysvinit, runit, etc just as easily.

Systemd isn’t a requirement for Linux. It is simply the most useful init system currently. If that ever stops being the case then changing init systems or entire even distros is a fairly trivial task. If systemd were ever to require me to submit to a 3rd party verification of my age I’d just use a different init system.

There is nothing that any open source project can do that would force me to keep using their software if I don’t want to.

They shouldn’t have done this. In mine, and many, many other peoples opinions as well.

If your opinion represents a large group of people then you should have no trouble maintaining a fork.

What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

That sounds super easy on paper. In practice nobody is going to do this long-term.

The kind of people who get massively upset about this are not the kind of people that are going to make a long term commitment to actually doing anything. Forking systemd is performative activism, that’s it.

As far as I can tell the Name Email and location are all voluntarily provided by the user.

So is birthDate.

This is something that will be used whether you want it to or not (that makes it invasive) because of the laws around it (of course depending on where you are).

How? First and most importantly, systemd doesn’t do anything to enforce, require or verify the field.

Second, I control what is installed on my PC, that’s the ENTIRE POINT of using a FOSS OS. The FREEDOM to install whatever I want, or not. If there is an application that is using that field to enforce some bs law, then I simply won’t install it.

This isn’t Windows, there isn’t a Microsoft to force you to install software updates that you don’t want. You’re FREE to not install software that does things that you don’t like. This includes any hypothetical future software that would require this field or validate this field.

Beyond All Reason (Total Annihilation community clone) is excellent and FOSS

Dwarf Fortress is free also (the Steam version is just a tile pack and some UI changes, Dwarf Fortress tile packs are legion)

I swear we’re in a post-reality reality.

There are dozens of us… in our labs printing zippers

The people that you’re looking for are politicians and companies like Meta who spend tens of millions of dollars to push these laws.

Not the random developer who created a PR to add an optional JSON field.

The ironic thing here is that this isn’t even the guy that accepted the merge request… that’s the person who actually added the code to the project. Anybody can submit a PR.

I’m completely with you on age verification. It’s pointless and harmful.

I’m not with anyone who supports a harassment campaign on a developer.

The government’s wants are not in the PR. The PR is an optional JSON field.

The field isn’t dangerous, you’re conflating two different things.

The age verification laws are the threat, not an optional text field or the developer who added it.

Looks like you’re trying to fuck someone over too.

Would you care to post your real name, place of work and the city and state where you live? I mean if you don’t want people to retaliate for fucking them over, then don’t fuck them over.

Or, do you understand the danger of having unhinged people on the Internet paint you as a target?

It paints him as an active danger, puts his picture on a wanted poster, includes his full name, workplace and the city and state where he lives and then writes up an article like an after action report of a cyberattack.

It then implies that he’s going to do it again and that he can’t be persuaded and so will be ‘harder to stop’.

Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money. Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again. That’s the true believer pattern. The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.

So if he’s done a bad thing, he’s going to do it again, and you can’t persuade him.

If you can’t read the implied call to action then you’re being deliberately dense.

You should read the article and understand the difference between a comparison and Whataboutism.

I swear nobody has read The Lord of the Rings…

You fail to make your point and when someone points out the failure of rationality, you just say ‘you just don’t get it’.

I think maybe ‘you just don’t get’ how to support your position.

Sorry Chairman Kim

You’re right.

“What if <insert dystopian scenario that hasn’t happened>?” is a silly argument.

Yes, you’re right.

This story was written to turn a developer in a villain. You are uncritically accepting the framing and supporting a harassment campaign.