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.

I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that. > > What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system.

  • hamsterkillEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    That would heavily depend on whether a fork splits systemd’s developers off. Controversial changes have spilt FOSS development teams before. The entire point of forks is to allow taking projects in different philosophical or technical directions.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      How does systemd having an optional birthDate field prevent children from having a computer?

      It also has fields for ‘Real Name’ and ‘Location’ (and has since the 1960s) without any problems. Most people don’t even know that they exist because they’re optional.