A single pull request turned a quiet open source contributor into the unlikely target of one of the Linux community's most heated controversies. We interacted with Dylan Taylor to hear his side of the story.

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.

  • Dremor@lemmy.world
    3·
    6 hours ago

    An open source software is, by law, the maintainer’s (which can be an individual, or a group of persons) property. It is said maintainer who has the right to grant you any kind of license over what he owns.

    In the case of an open-source project, that license is very permissive, true, but if you take the time to read any of those, you will always see :

    • A provision indicating that the owners grants that licence within the limits of the applicable laws
    • Sometimes a provision indicating under which juridiction said license is granted. If not, the user local laws are the ones used.

    Source : the fucking law and the fucking licenses. And my friend, which happens to be a lawyer specialized in intellectual property laws.