Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.
The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.
But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.
At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.
He barely went into developing systemd for two weeks before shoehorning in his bootlicking, he can fuck off. You’re supposed to stick it to the man, not stick up for him
I can’t help but feel bad for Dylan. It’s not like if he hadn’t done this someone else wouldn’t have had to eventually.
It’s not like he had no way of thinking, “Geez, I don’t have the experience or knowledge or insignts to start the ball rolling on such a major decision.” and went on to do something useful instead.
I was expecting civil discourse and a level-headed response.
He may have been hoping for that, but surely he didn’t truely expect it. The FOSS community can barely have a civil discussion about filesystems.
At the moment of most intense debates about mandatory age checks and government surveillance you (Dylan) hoped people to be calm about this? Then you my friend are simply delusional. They are angry and for a good reason. Why the rush to comply with a surveillance practice that hasn’t forced on you with some sanction or enforcement. You did not even wait for it to play out. You did not have a discourse about alternatives. You just went ahead and hastily applied a change as if as if doing some sort of coup.
Y’all are going after this guy rn but in a few months we should expect more and more distros to do changes like this. So lets think, what is the real issue going on here? The real issue is that these distros are hosted on GitHub, which is a Microsoft company, and they will comply in a heartbeat and take that shit down if the software is against the law. So the two options are to move off Github or wait until it gets taken down, and lawyer up and fight California and Colorado, which if so, we’d better start a fund as a community for some lawyers for these devs.
Being on Linux and in control of your OS couldn’t you just set the age statically to something like 99? I really do not understand the hate :/
He has nothing to defend
The damage is done
He’s a collaborator; we don’t want parasites like him
In free software, there is FREEDOM
I didn’t switch to Linux to end up under the thumb of Microsoft’s henchmen and some random government
Lol.
The free part is you are free to remove the commit and build it yourself. Doofus.
Woah, fuck this guy. He admitted the change was for the purpose of complying with these laws
It’s a fucking field. Why is everyone loosing his mind over it? It’s not like it is required, nor will it prevent you to do anything if you put data in (except not being able to change it later).
If you have to complain, complain about the law, not poor guy that has to add it, by law.
A single law pushed through in a single state in a single country should not lead to systemic changes in FOSS projects used worldwide.
The largest state in the union that has a GDP larger than many countries.
