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.
What fucking distro would make this change besides redhat?
Look, it sucks that they’re complaying early with no push back ok. Like not even watiing until the law goes into affect at the least. But what else are they supposed to do besides comply, get off Github or lawyer up when the time comes. If you don’t belive they can move off GIthub then we, as a community, should try to support these devs for a legal battle with the state. I don’t care about this guy, I care about long term solutions to protect our privicy. And to answer your question I don’t think many distos are going to switch off Github, that is a laborus task. I just don’t know what other solutions to this problem are besides this
Lawyer up? Who are they going to sue? Most Foss projects are not a legal entity.
For the few that are (eg connnical) they can just move the org to Canada or Mexico or wherever in Europe that doesn’t have insane laws.
Everyone continues to work remotely. It’s easy.
They will get kicked off Github by Microsoft when they get somthing in the mail by the state of California for hosting content that vilolates the law.
So they push to codeberg. What’s your point?
Git is decentralized. You’re not citing a problem that can’t be fixed in a few hours.
That is literally my point. But i think you’re underestimating how difficult a task like that is not only just to migrate but also to learn new tools, if it were so easy, why haven’t they done it yet? Not to mention the servers and fiscal activity done in the US that will also be targeted and moving to places like the EU where they are already implementing ID verification laws isn’t a good idea. They’d have to move them to other countries that are less likely to do such a thing, but there are no guarantees those countries will stay safe. So do you think the devs would rather do all that or add an age field that is stored locally? If the laws get worse (which they very well might), we should start funding campaigns that try to fight these laws through legal means and through awareness, this is personally what I think is the best idea but I’m open to hearing other methods. Getting mad at this one guy is doing nothing and if anything, will make devs not want to maintain these projects.
Debian, Ubuntu, most of their derivatives except the niche ones, Arch, Endeavor, Manjaro, Fedora. Basically all major ones.
Mark my words.
Lol wit. No. Debian, arch, and Fedora are Foss projects. They have no reason to folloa the whims of these stupid laws.
They can just move the code to Iceland or whatever. It’s easy.
The donations for Debian, Arch and a dozen others are collected and distributed by a non-profit that sits in the US, which also represents them legally. If they’re sued into oblivion, the distros have no more money for hosting their repos.
Nope, just change fiscal hosts. It’s really easy.
Yeah, really easy, just all employees suddenly work for a foreign organisation which pays salary in foreign currency, while they’re still living and expected to pay income tax in the US. Transfers of money and tech are now cross-border and subject to Trump’s Truthed tariffs. All servers have to be transferred to different hosts, all SPF records need to be changed, all contact info updated.
Nothing difficult at all, it’s all really easy.
But hey, they avoided putting an empty data field in their OS, and with their 1% market share they sure sent a strong signal that’ll get lawmakers who have never even heard of Linux to reconsider.
Yes. Easy.
Also wtf we’re talking about Foss software projects that have no employees.