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.
Why would I want some stupid verification field needed only in one state in one country I don’t even live in? It shouldn’t be in my FOSS when it is not required in my home location. I would like to stay as far away from a dystopian police state as possible, tyvm. No lawyers needed; I’m not in their jurisdiction.
Like ur right, it’s total bull that this shit affects you. But the only way they could keep you totally isolated would be to host and finance an entire instance in your county, which ain’t easy for a FOSS project. Like it absolutely sucks that large parts of the world have to bend to the will of American and, to a lesser extent, European tech.
One place in one country wants one law. That place in that country will have to isolate its citizens from the rest of the world. Not force the world to play by their rules. Everyone who bends the knee to this kind of overzealous information gathering should be excised from FOSS communities as it only leads to worse things down the line. Every single piece of PID can be connected to all other previously disclosed PID even after “anonymisation” has been applied. Google and Meta do nothing else on the daily.
That’s sadly not how the world works. The code for the most popular distros is posted and maintained on Github which is owned by Microsoft, a US company. If the state of California sees that Github is hosting illegal content, they will block that site and Microsoft isn’t going to want that site to be blocked in the state that Sillicon Vally is located in. All financial institutions that are located in America are also not going to let themselves be open to any form of lawsuit from the state of California for allowing transactions for “illegal” software and will instead block donations. It sucks but most FOSS projects rely on these shitty companies to run, and these corps would rather sack any project than let the smallest possibility of a lawsuit happen. So basically, the USA sucks and other countries will hopefully stop relying on this shitty country