The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/
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.
I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an ID to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies.
Also:
What the hell is the issue here? Do you need to be a member of an organization to submit a PR? And if the lack of organisational backing would be a problem, why is it a problem that the people merging it do work for an organisation? The only thing that matters is that an official committer approves it.
This whole article sounds like pointless fear mongering.
@mcv I, for one, fail to understand why FOSS projects, which aren't centralized legal corporations, should, in any capacity, comply with a law enacted in state(s) in a single country on the planet, laws which are being challenged.
If the state of Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra in India enacted the same law, would FOSS projects rush to implement those laws? I seriously doubt that would happen. Is the state of California somehow special?
Even if those PRs do not actually implement a method to verify the age of a person, it's ... repulsive to see how people are acting in response to said law. Sure, we can omit giving our birth dates or give fake birth dates but that's not the point? If Canonical or Red Hat added patches in response to these laws in their distribution, for which they get a lot of money from enterprise subscriptions, that would make sense. However, all I see at the moment is the pervasive corporate influence in the FOSS world and the desire by FOSS projects to be "friendly" for wider distribution.
I agree it's probably safe for Linux to ignore that law. But regardless of that law, I don't see a problem with having this field either. It doesn't hurt the user any more than having the option to store your real name does. And that's no less sensitive information.
I think if this feature had been added a year or a decade ago, nobody would have cared. But now people are suddenly projecting their valid concerns about these age verification laws onto this PR.
@mcv Right, practically speaking, there's no issue in having that field and it seems harmless to me (unless it's enforced or verified). But that's not my point. The reason, motivations, and timings of these changes is what's significantly problematic. It shows how some arbitrary laws in a particular state in a particular country is enough to make certain influential open source maintainers fall in line, even when they don't really need to.
I guess it's hard to maintain a clear line that separates community free software with corporate open source software.
"Fall in line"? They're not giving up anything with this.
@mcv It's not about giving something up, it's about not accepting things at face value. It's about not questioning whether something needs to be done or not and just doing it because it's easier to comply rather than wait and make an informed and independent decision. It's about not pausing for a moment to introspect and think if something makes sense and just jumping at the first sign of possibility to do something that may have consequences (losing trust).
Let's assume that the state of Karnataka, which hosts the city of Bengaluru, a major IT centre in India, legally proclaims that all operating systems being used in India should ask a user about their gender at the time of installation. I expect Microsoft and Apple to comply with such a law I wouldn't blame them at all. I would also expect Red Hat to comply with that law. However, I don't see a single FOSS maintainer who implemented/accepted the birth date field to add a gender field in response. If they do, that'd be just as messed up as it is right now, even if there'd be no practical issues with the addition of such field.
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