• chloroken@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      4 months ago

      Developers are not a protected class. They do not get special social protections when they do ignorant things.

  • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    “It’s just a harmless field; what’s the big deal?”

    The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

    It’s not the adding of the field itself or the fact that it can be filled with nonsense. It’s the reasoning backing it.

    “But it’s the law!”

    Yeah, fucking and…? It’s a stupid mass surveillance law disguised as a protection, and per usual, it’s written like vague dog shit. This is the smallest part of the wedge. More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.

    • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      4 months ago

      “But it’s the law!”

      I was just following orders!

      this same person would be chuckling to themself about how pointless this all is as he locks the door on the gas chambers.

      • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        4 months ago

        He’s adding age verification for the internet, not sending people to gas chambers. You really need to touch grass, urgently, because clearly your dependence on the internet is not healthy.

  • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    I have read the git thread related to the merge request.

    I don’t see what’s the big deal. You have a user model that already contain fields like user’s full name, location, … among others and all this developer did was adding yet another optional field called date of birth.

    This does nothing to verify user’s age and enforce nothing. They’ve stressed that repeatedly in the comments.

    What that does is making it easy for a Linux distro to store user’s birthday - should they wish to do so - and making that bit of info accessible to running apps so that each app can do what it wants with it.

    User’s fullname and location are already there which are also optional so what’s the big deal?

    • Jack@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      4 months ago

      For me the bigger problem is that was done without any community oversight.

      Yeah it can be verified for now, but it’s a foot in the door for a braindead law that no one in their right mind would follow.

  • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    Genuine question, don’t we always say that we can change anything in the system on open source software like Linux and systemd etc? What’s stopping any of us from removing this age verification thing? Apps may break, true, but I’m sure there will be many one line scripts that replace that age verification with something that feeds it fake data?

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      4 months ago

      Tbf simply following the development and criticizing bad design decisions is also one way to change opensource software no?

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        4 months ago

        There’s a massive difference between criticizing bad decisions and articles like the one in the OP who’s painting the developer as a target.

        There’s plenty of ways for the open source community to handle this. This isn’t one of them.

        Brigading and harassing volunteer developer is way out of bounds.

  • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    Lots of disingenuous comments in this thread regarding the change being “just json” considering they’re already on a warpath of implementing id verification. They are testing the water to see what they can get away with. Furthermore, the Linux community has always been against shit like this (see: systemd outrage, open bios, gnu etc).

  • Archr@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    This whole article/blog post reads as “How dare this person follow the law. ;(”

    I really don’t understand the pushback on this one person for submitting the change request. When it is the lawmaker that put this law into place that we should be criticizing. The post repeatedly uses how the contributer said that the change was “hilariously pointless and ineffective.” As some sort of gotcha as to why the merge should not have been accepted but does not explain why the maintainers should not follow the law other than “law bad”.

    It also consistently calls out the various peoples’ places of work and experience as some sort of boogeyman for why they should not be allowed to contribute to open source. If these people were universally accepted to be bad actors in the community then they would not be accepted as reviewers for these projects. This just attacks their character to try to prove a point.

  • 1dalm@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    The funny thing is that by January 7, all the bros screaming “I’ll never use an OS that asks my age” will have switched to an OS that asks their age because they can’t go a week without their porn.

  • gasull@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    He didn’t just try. He succeeded in doing so. His pull request was merged into systemd and will land into your distro eventually (if it is systemd-based).

    There are distros free of systemd, like Devuan, based on Debian.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    I disagree with age verification as well, but attacking a person like this is gross.

    This article is all but brigading people into harassing this guy.

    • shirro@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.

      Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.

  • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    Excellent. Just having his face out there will discourage him for good, once he gets the backlash.

    He should just fuck off, we don’t need free and open source anything that is in league with Palantir.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    Jesus fucking Christ guys. Regardless of your thoughts on age verification, hunting down someone just for complying with the (currently) rather inoffensive law is nuts.

    Posting his face here is absolutely going to get him doxxed, and going to cause someone to actually hunt him down and hurt him.

    Focus your anger on the people who actually passed and push for this law. Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.

  • Alex@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    4 months ago

    What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you’d think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one’s freedom is being oppressed here.