This is a lot of fuss about realistically nothing but I completely understand why and frankly I am pleased to see it. People should be pissed off about age verification laws and the way they’re being implemented.
systemd doesn’t enforce anything about birth dates, this is totally optional and completely falsifiable, and if anyone ever tried to enforce anything based on it that would be a totally separate system and purely hypothetical at this point. This is never going to actually be a realistic part of any implementation that actually works (not that there is ever likely to be any implementation that ever works) because that’s the beauty of open source. As soon as anyone ever develops an implementation that actually works, it will be forked and removed just like this. Nobody is going to voluntarily use that, and if the law requires us to, nobody’s going to comply with the law either.
This is more like a shot across the bow to say “we will never put up with this and we’ll show you exactly what we’re going to do if you try” than it is a realistic need at this point. Still, good for making sure they understand we are armed and we are not going down without a fight (that they won’t win).
The issue isn’t resolved because this doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an issue because it’s a ratchet. If we let it proceed, there’s almost no way for us to go back.
It’s open source software with a full commit history, you can literally always go back and it’s impossible to prevent you from having that ability. The whole point of Linux is it can be whatever you want, there’s literally zero way that any government could realistically control Linux, nor any way to implement a practical system to enforce age verification when anybody can bypass it in their install at any time.
Nobody can convince me that in a world were governments can’t even stop non-anonymous piracy that they’re going to be in any way effective at controlling an operating system primarily used by technically savvy people, which is primarily distributed by P2P software most used for piracy.
That’s not what I meant. I meant, once it becomes normal for projects to accept this as standard, more will use/require it. Maybe not the systemd version specifically, but the general concept. Sure, you can always fork it and create a version free from it, but eventually it’ll be too much for any individual to want to deal with and the standards will shift. There will probably always be a distro that doesn’t have any of it, but it’ll become increasingly isolated and incompatible.
This is a lot of fuss about realistically nothing but I completely understand why and frankly I am pleased to see it. People should be pissed off about age verification laws and the way they’re being implemented.
systemd doesn’t enforce anything about birth dates, this is totally optional and completely falsifiable, and if anyone ever tried to enforce anything based on it that would be a totally separate system and purely hypothetical at this point. This is never going to actually be a realistic part of any implementation that actually works (not that there is ever likely to be any implementation that ever works) because that’s the beauty of open source. As soon as anyone ever develops an implementation that actually works, it will be forked and removed just like this. Nobody is going to voluntarily use that, and if the law requires us to, nobody’s going to comply with the law either.
This is more like a shot across the bow to say “we will never put up with this and we’ll show you exactly what we’re going to do if you try” than it is a realistic need at this point. Still, good for making sure they understand we are armed and we are not going down without a fight (that they won’t win).
The issue isn’t resolved because this doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an issue because it’s a ratchet. If we let it proceed, there’s almost no way for us to go back.
It’s open source software with a full commit history, you can literally always go back and it’s impossible to prevent you from having that ability. The whole point of Linux is it can be whatever you want, there’s literally zero way that any government could realistically control Linux, nor any way to implement a practical system to enforce age verification when anybody can bypass it in their install at any time.
Nobody can convince me that in a world were governments can’t even stop non-anonymous piracy that they’re going to be in any way effective at controlling an operating system primarily used by technically savvy people, which is primarily distributed by P2P software most used for piracy.
That’s not what I meant. I meant, once it becomes normal for projects to accept this as standard, more will use/require it. Maybe not the systemd version specifically, but the general concept. Sure, you can always fork it and create a version free from it, but eventually it’ll be too much for any individual to want to deal with and the standards will shift. There will probably always be a distro that doesn’t have any of it, but it’ll become increasingly isolated and incompatible.