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.
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