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Comment on Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support

As far as I can tell the Name Email and location are all voluntarily provided by the user.

So is birthDate.

This is something that will be used whether you want it to or not (that makes it invasive) because of the laws around it (of course depending on where you are).

How? First and most importantly, systemd doesn’t do anything to enforce, require or verify the field.

Second, I control what is installed on my PC, that’s the ENTIRE POINT of using a FOSS OS. The FREEDOM to install whatever I want, or not. If there is an application that is using that field to enforce some bs law, then I simply won’t install it.

This isn’t Windows, there isn’t a Microsoft to force you to install software updates that you don’t want. You’re FREE to not install software that does things that you don’t like. This includes any hypothetical future software that would require this field or validate this field.

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Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
You control what you install on your pc and I’d be willing to bet that whatever open source OS it is, probably uses Systemd. Unless you’re a Unix person.

They have set this up in a way that yes, right now at 11:21pm UTC on March 24th it isn’t being enforced or required.

But because of the replies of some of the maintainers in their github about this very merge they are suggesting that as soon as it becomes hard law, it will be enforced by them.

Particularly the part where one was replying to a system76 developer who mentioned that they are in talks with state legislators right now, that these proposed laws are very possibly going to be overturned, and that open source software might not even be required to do this at all and that we should give it more tim before we do something like this and the reply was:

“It is possible that California law will be changed. But similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it’s unlikely that they’ll all go away. This implementation is fairly generic and useful for other things besides age verification, so we shouldn’t decide whether to merge it or not based on a single law in any jurisdiction.”

This suggests that they are doing this because of laws and ideas like this that are coming into play. And that they didn’t want to wait on the confirmation of whether it was law or not, they did it anyway. Why? That’s not very open. That isn’t really taking a stand to support Linux or its users that is voluntarily getting ahead of the control mechanism that “similar ideas” are going to use.

They shouldn’t have done this. In mine, and many, many other peoples opinions as well.

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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  You control what you install on your pc and I’d be willing to bet that whatever open source OS it is, probably uses Systemd.
  
  They have set this up in a way that yes, right now at 11:21pm UTC on March 24th it isn’t being enforced or required.
  
  It is using systemd, yes. It could be using openRC, sysvinit, runit, etc just as easily.
  
  Systemd isn’t a requirement for Linux. It is simply the most useful init system currently. If that ever stops being the case then changing init systems or entire even distros is a fairly trivial task. If systemd were ever to require me to submit to a 3rd party verification of my age I’d just use a different init system.
  
  There is nothing that any open source project can do that would force me to keep using their software if I don’t want to.
  
  They shouldn’t have done this. In mine, and many, many other peoples opinions as well.
  
  If your opinion represents a large group of people then you should have no trouble maintaining a fork.
  
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  - Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    You are right on that.
    
    I hope that in the end this does end up all working out and I was just one of the crazy guys worried for no reason.
    
    But either way I still think it is disappointing they did this so quickly and that they’re using a US push in law be such a deciding factor in originally pushing for it. It felt like that was the same way when they banned Russian maintainers. The USA and especially specific states shouldn’t have this much pull especially over open source community driven projects in my opinion.
    
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    FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    The USA and especially specific states shouldn’t have this much pull especially over open source community driven projects in my opinion.
    
    I completely agree.
    
    I hope we see a bigger push for FOSS software in the EU as they try to reduce their dependency on US tech companies. If more countries treat software like we treat science where everyone contributes and everyone benefits then we’ll all be better off.
    
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