Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
Never. Let shit hit the fan if it has to. Fight back instead of swallowing the whole boot.
Legitimately the way various porn sites addressed similar laws is the way to go. Verification required in this state? “Well we’re no longer serving this state’s traffic at all, and conveniently here’s the contact info of the government officials to blame, enjoy!”
Hi. Are you a maintainer of one of the distros that might be affected by this law? If you aren’t then you have no standing to blindly tell them that they should not follow the law and risk fines that would ruin the funding for their project(s).
Bringing up porn sites is a false equivalency. Many of these laws do not require verification of ID or face scans as some are incorrectly claiming. They require a birthdate be entered during installation. The laws surrounding porn sites required 3rd party age verification which many of these sites said would not only crater their traffic from these states but also introduce a privacy nightmare which would also work against their business interests.