Forking is easy. Maintaining the fork is the hard part.
Yup. Was about to say, I think I saw dozens of forks on the day.
Yah, there was some bullshit like this that had people start "Ageless Linux" that was basically a script for people to change their sources on a Debian install to their version, and they haven't done any sort of updates in over 2 months, to the surprise of nobody.
What a tempest in a teapot.
Do they need to do any updates? The point of it was the message, it was never about making a serious OS. It was literally just "we're going to break California law because there isn't shit a single state in the US can do about it".
Also, I thought I read that open source projects were recently exempted, so the point is probably moot now anyway.
It was obviously performative at the time. A lot of bitching and moaning but in the end, it was a nothingburger change that distros could ignore as they do every other field on the user profile in systemD. But they had to make a "distro" to show how serious they were, then ignore it completely.
I said at the time if it were maintained in 90 days I'd eat a bug. Apparently I was off by about 75 days.
This is a lot of fuss about realistically nothing but I completely understand why and frankly I am pleased to see it. People should be pissed off about age verification laws and the way they're being implemented.
systemd doesn't enforce anything about birth dates, this is totally optional and completely falsifiable, and if anyone ever tried to enforce anything based on it that would be a totally separate system and purely hypothetical at this point. This is never going to actually be a realistic part of any implementation that actually works (not that there is ever likely to be any implementation that ever works) because that's the beauty of open source. As soon as anyone ever develops an implementation that actually works, it will be forked and removed just like this. Nobody is going to voluntarily use that, and if the law requires us to, nobody's going to comply with the law either.
This is more like a shot across the bow to say "we will never put up with this and we'll show you exactly what we're going to do if you try" than it is a realistic need at this point. Still, good for making sure they understand we are armed and we are not going down without a fight (that they won't win).
The issue isn't resolved because this doesn't actually do anything. It's an issue because it's a ratchet. If we let it proceed, there's almost no way for us to go back.
It's open source software with a full commit history, you can literally always go back and it's impossible to prevent you from having that ability. The whole point of Linux is it can be whatever you want, there's literally zero way that any government could realistically control Linux, nor any way to implement a practical system to enforce age verification when anybody can bypass it in their install at any time.
Nobody can convince me that in a world were governments can't even stop non-anonymous piracy that they're going to be in any way effective at controlling an operating system primarily used by technically savvy people, which is primarily distributed by P2P software most used for piracy.
That's not what I meant. I meant, once it becomes normal for projects to accept this as standard, more will use/require it. Maybe not the systemd version specifically, but the general concept. Sure, you can always fork it and create a version free from it, but eventually it'll be too much for any individual to want to deal with and the standards will shift. There will probably always be a distro that doesn't have any of it, but it'll become increasingly isolated and incompatible.
FFS, just make a patch.
Yeah, I'm not sure how this is implemented but wouldn't it be trivial to write a patch or even an external script to periodically update the field to some random value?
I was thinking just patch it out entirely, then you have no need to maintain a fork, just a script. Yours sounds fun too, but it's not like it's actually connected to anything at this stage, worth keeping in mind if it ever does become something.
I prefer the idea of a script that changes the birth date randomly, on a random schedule.
Or to always be the bare minimum "adult" age every day.
Or always be 99
Fucking sweet. Honestly, we could just have one with and one without, build the OS making the selection, and have both available if it solves the issue. Put the burden on parents to make sure kids are using the OS with verification and leave everyone else alone.
But kudos to these folks!
the issue is not the presence or absence of any one json field. the issue is this random bootlicker with a history of foss-antithetical "contributions" being let anywhere near the decision tree in the first place., poettering the benevolent dictator adopting this idiocy and then, faced with a fucking tsunami of push-back and negative sentiment along every step of the process, doubling down on the decision to include it anyway because fuck you that's why. unnecessarily, as it turned out but that is beside the point.
point is, none of the things above indicate there's a healthy system in place for something that's becoming an integral part of what we consider linux and can't so easily be ripped out no more.
There are other system inits too
Like there are many issues with systemD and it is by design
Protest forks never last in my experience
This is the lower effort version of xLibre. GL to both projects but I can't see them getting anywhere.
Yeah maintaining a fork that seems like it's going to be illegal to work on in many countries definitely will solve the problem.
Wtf are you talking about? How is working on a init system illegal?
seems like it's going to be
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