Mastodawn

k3ym𖺀 4d ago

@wwahammy wtf… these are current maintainers???

Eric Schultz 4d ago

@k3ym0 some are. systemd already merged a corresponding change from the same contributor.

k3ym𖺀 4d ago

@wwahammy can’t we fork it prior to that commit and maintain a separate fork?

k3ym𖺀 4d ago

Eric Schultz

@k3ym0 could it be done theoretically? Sure. But on systemd, that'd be a huge task to maintain. And the systemd folks say "oh, this PR is just an optional part of the user account system, we're just making a common API for anyone who wants to add it for any reason".

They build the tracks and plead innocence as to what is in the trains.

Yrrsinn 4d ago

I found this a good write-up https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.

Sam Bent

https://fosstodon.org/@atoponce/116255862979155448

zl2tod 4d ago

@yrrsinn

Receipt:

Tagomago 3d ago

@zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 wtf, so now Linux and we all are under California ruling? California Über Alles?? Well I hadn’t anything against systemd, now I have a big one.

@tagomago @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 there are similar laws being approved and some are already in force in many places through out the world.

Tagomago 3d ago

@DiogoConstantino @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 Imho legalism is not a valid standpoint, precisely in free software. What if free software is made illegal in California (and “many other places”). Would you just shrug and stop making it? This is at best cowardice. Also, I find the fait accompli argumentation on the PR (“we already collect personal data 🤷”) so disgusting. As if this was nothing at all.

This is what happens when you hollow out ethics, you’re left with technicalities.

@tagomago @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 your stand point is childish and imbecile this is a political and legal issue, and it's exactly at this nature that both the definition of Free Software is, and that this problem is.

@tagomago @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0

zl2tod 3d ago

@DiogoConstantino

Nice ad hom dude.

@zl2tod @tagomago @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 just like he's doing to the developers and others he's accusing not having ethics, but not even making the minimal effort to put himself on their shoes, the shoes of users that would be forbiden from using software without this.

@zl2tod @tagomago @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 he likely knows nothing about those developers, like if they are actually organizing to fight in the ways that can actually be successful in repealing or ammending these laws. But he still attacks them.

@zl2tod @tagomago @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 I've been a Free Software advocate for 26 years, I and others have fought many fights like this, shaming and attacking developers and demademanding them to not obey the law to be ethical, was never successful.

@zl2tod @tagomago @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 and in my country we have actually won fights: example we can legally break DRM, because we did the political fight, we tirelessly enganged with politicians, until we convinced them to change the law.

@zl2tod @tagomago @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 making it more risky to develop, distribute, having a livelyhood, and to use Free Software, is not a considerate or ethical attitude, it's the opposite, specially if "you're," demanding others to suffer the consequences, it's a very entitled attitude.

@tagomago @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0

Alexander 😷3d ago

@DiogoConstantino FFS, another clown who's completely ignorant about Free Software being a political movement. GTFO

Sharp Cheddar Goblin 3d ago

@DiogoConstantino With all due respect, go fuck yourself.

LupertEverett 19h ago

@DiogoConstantino @tagomago @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 thought I'd join to the folks who told you to go fuck yourself so...

Go fuck yourself.

slotos 3d ago

@tagomago @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 Systemd also accepts vibe code. The init system with unnecessarily massive development attack surface now got so much better !!

Tagomago 3d ago

@slotos @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 Ugghh... thanks for letting me know. 🙃

deutrino 1d ago

@tagomago @zl2tod @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 this sole action tipped me from the "I don't really like systemd but meh whatever" camp into the "fuck systemd for multiple highly valid reasons" camp

I hope Devuan gets a major influx of volunteers, they sure could use it

Florian Berger (privat)3d ago

@yrrsinn

What the ... I, I don't. 😳

Scott D. Strader 😐3d ago

@yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 From the article: "The surveillance state runs on volunteers: people who do the implementation work for free, out of genuine conviction, with no paper trail connecting them to the money that wrote the laws."

AnneH 3d ago

@sstrader @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 "Do not comply in advance"

Cy 3d ago

The community pushed back hard on this one. The Arch maintainers are holding, Canonical backed away, and Artix Linux, the systemd-free Arch derivative, issued the clearest statement: they will never require any verification or ID. It's FOSS When someone opened a revert PR, Lennart closed it himself on March 19th. The birthDate field is in systemd and it's staying.
It's funny because only Artix isn't actively enforcing this change. Arch are lying that they're holding (they're not). Canonical are lying that they're backing away (they're not). How can I tell? Both of them use systemd. Both of them require systemd. So anything that gets merged into systemd, they require, whether they want to or not.

It's a fuggin disgrace to see people downstream of an important change saying "Oh no, no we aren't gonna comply with this nosirree," while forcing upstream compliance of it down our throats just by being useless tools.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

@cy @wwahammy @yrrsinn Canonical never had a position, stop pushing fake news.

maxime borges 12h ago

@cy @wwahammy @yrrsinn
> whether they want to or not

I mean they could also cherry-pick the revert-commit and call it a day for now, but it's gonna be messy to track future changes. afaik there hasn't been a new release with this change introduced yet?

Mateusz 🏳️‍🌈3d ago

@yrrsinn Don’t blame the guy. He’s a victim of surveillance capitalism as we are, except that he was just given the role of the bad guy.

Kat S 3d ago

@aemstuz @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 He volunteered for the role of bad guy, so yes, we're blaming him.

Two? foxes in a trench coat 3d ago

@aemstuz @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 This person voluntarily and enthusiastically complies in advance, he wasn't "given a role" or wasn't forced in any way to make such changes. This world surely would have been a better place if the people wouldn't do that...

@aemstuz @yrrsinn @wwahammy @k3ym0 We blame both.

Luke T. Shumaker 4d ago

So the age verification stuff is beyond terrible. But the systemd PR specifically seems like a weird one to get worked up about?

It does 2 things:
1) The schema-docs for the the userdb JSON, which already allows you to add arbitrary user-defined fields in addition to the pre-defined fields, now define an optional "birthDate" field to be to be a "YYYY-MM-DD" string.
2) Added a flag to `userdbctl` (edit: `homectl`, actually) to be able to set the field from that command, instead of having to edit the JSON some other way.

Like, I already deal with multi-user systems where "hobbies" is a field in there. I don't see the harm in saying "If you wanna add a birthDate field, it should be 'YYYY-MM-DD' and not seconds-since-epoch or something".

The polkit stuff? Makes my gut churn.

Eric Schultz 4d ago

@lukeshu @k3ym0 I don't think it's possible to separate them in the abstract. There is clearly a common intent and a belief that this doesn't work unless they're all merged.

Luke T. Shumaker 3d ago

So that's clearly (scumbag) Dylan M. Taylor's intent and belief. But I think it is valid to separate them for the purpose of evaluating folks-other-than-Dylan; I don't think bluca did anything wrong by merging it (nor poettering for lgtm'ing it). I don't think it's valid to say "welp, systemd added age verification, I have to switch to a non-systemd OS now to avoid age verification."[1] I think it's totally valid for bluca and poettering to look at the PR and think "the author's motivation is bad, but this specific change is fine."

"They build the tracks and plead innocence as to what is in the trains." I feel that way about a lot of stuff, but... this is even more removed than that? There's no policy engine. "They approved a standard for the width of train tracks."?

[1]: There are plenty of valid reasons to prefer other init systems, but I don't think "birthDate" showing up in a json schema is one of them.

Luke T. Shumaker 3d ago

As someone who was once noted on Wikipedia for maintaining a fork of systemd, I think this is a really silly reason for wanting to fork systemd.

Eric Schultz 3d ago

@lukeshu @k3ym0 I don't really see this as a case where forking would help anyways. The problem is that the default is supporting the system I oppose. If someone were to fork, which I agree would be kinda pointless anyways, that doesn't solve the original problem: soon, the default for the Linux desktop is for age-gating to be supported and that's bad.

sirtao 20h ago

As somebody who intends to switch distro over this: it's not addition of the field.
It's the reason behind the addition: in-advance compliance with laws with limited geographic scope and no actual implementation details.
Plus absolutely the utter and complete dismissal of all critiques by the systemd people.
Basically this poisoned the trust on the maintainers ESPECIALLY because it's such a "minor" change.
No reason to get the user angry if it's something "you just can not use".(and the presence of other PII is not the gotcha they think it is)
The insistance means it's either ego, malice, or both.
(I'm going with "ego": the person responsible for this first suggested it on twitter, got people telling him don't do it, and went and did it anyway)

I'll also add this was the straw tha broke camel's back for me(never been the biggest systemd fan).

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

Dźwiedziu 3d ago

@wwahammy
Technically you could build without the offending functionality, but would you want to use something designed with so much user-hostile intent?

@k3ym0

Hasani Hunter 3d ago

@wwahammy @k3ym0 Aaaand this is the kind of shit that was brought up when SystemD came to being. That Pottering (RedHat) just did whatever they wanted and forced changes across the entire FOSS ecosystem.

And Lennart blocking the merge to revert the merge is just icing on the fucking cake.

And here we are yet again getting a feature pushed across the ecosystem without debate or consensus, driven by a small group of devs with commit access

qwertz 1d ago

@hasani @wwahammy @k3ym0

Not only that, but the fact that it’s Microsoft developers themselves doing this (a company that, by the way, has effectively taken over the Linux Foundation...) really drives the point home....

Similarly, from the very beginning, it was always suspicious that Microsoft had suddenly become pro-FOSS years ago; we said so, and no one wanted to believe us... MS has only one goal, and with Pottering, it has found a way to achieve it...