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In the case of arts. Arts is the transmitter of the message “human’s have rights”. Usually art also depicts some sort of human right, like freedom.

I am not sure how this can be applied to code. There are some projects that use a ukrainian flag to indicate support for ukraine. Is that what you mean by that?

I think code should be free of politics. I don’t want my tennis club to support human rights either. I want to play tennis, not make politics.

So… are you using nothing but FOSS from activist projects? That doesn’t seem like a big pool, from what I’ve seen. Or do you mean support as in with your time and/or money?

I have only partially until now. But sadly it looks like we’re entering times where choices regarding activism will become more important and inevitable. The pool with get larger. Any kind of support: money, time, developing, participating, promoting, legal…

The ongoing discussions about age-verification and changes in Free and Open-Source Software and GNU Linux and related OSs made me realize a gross misunderstanding on my part. I think many other users may have the same misunderstanding (seeing many comments using the word “traitors”), and it’s important that we become aware of it. We must understand that using or saying “FOSS” or “Linux” does not automatically mean to stand up for human rights, for the community, against corporations, and similar goals and values.

If we read the comments in those age-verification posts we can see that many developers and possibly also users make statements like “the developers have no obligation towards the community”, “the law is the law, no matter what the community wants”, “we must comply”, and similar. It’s important to realize that many developers work on FOSS not out of consideration for the community, or for human rights, or against corporations. For them it’s just one kind of software development. We may have projects that are FOSS and pro-corporations or pro-surveillance. The “F” in FOSS stands for freedom to modify and distribute the software by/to anyone in the community. It doesn’t stand for “software that promotes / stands up for general human freedom and human rights”. But of course there are also developers that work with FOSS because of such values.

So for anyone who, like me, wants to use and promote software as an assertion of, and a stand for, human rights and against corporations, it’s necessary not to stop at “FOSS” or “Linux” but apply more scrutiny and more careful choices. Probably it’s always been like this, but the present times require extra awareness.

I wish there was an acronym or other word that made this moral aspect of some FOSS development clear. This would help users to recognize software projects that share their values, and also those FOSS developers who do work for those values. Is there such a term already out there?

I’m no Marxist

the people who own Walmart and Amazon are the people who work there

Friend, may I introduce you to a little something known as “Dictatorship of the Proletariat?“

Yeah, I’m not really into “dictatorship” of any sort. Y’all need to update your language to contemporary English.

I already have the distros downloaded that are against this.

If it comes for my favorite distro that I use everyday I will immediately uninstall it and instance one of the ones that isn’t bending over to let Uncle Sam and others take them from behind.

All they had to do was say they wouldn’t support people from the places that those laws were or would be enacted in. That’s it. That’s all they fucking had to do.

I was very confused about this too. But now I realize that’s not what “FOSS” means to everyone. There are developers that work with FOSS in the same way they could (or do) work for a corporation – note the many comments like “users don’t have any rights to make demands of developers”, “developers don’t owe anything to the users or to the ‘community’”, and similar comments. Luckily there are also developers for which “FOSS” does mean what it means to you and me.

Maybe there are other FOSS users that are under the same misunderstanding as I was. It should be made clear that “FOSS”, per se, really means nothing else than “not requiring payments” and “with source open to the public”. Any extra meanings depend on whom you’re speaking to.

I do worry.

Technically right now the age thing in systemd is just a stored field that you can set to anything easily. In its current form pretty benign and not a privacy issue.

But it almost always gets worse and more and more controls get added, until we’re at face verification services and other privacy invasive stuff.

Yes. Open source software is never really (in theory, yes (jurisdiction of the project/developers), but not in practice) dependent on particular jurisdictions anywhere, because it’s like open knowledge that can be instantly translated/compiled/packaged into a usable product. And this open knowledge can spread anywhere and also be modified by anyone anywhere at any time.

And this is important, as we’re seeing with the US now drifting into a fascist dictatorship that stopped being reasonable or sane and just does what it wants. Open source is an important defense against the appearance of criminal regimes, because it guarantees independence and always possible continuation of the software.

So for example even if the devs/maintainers of open source projects would be legally forced to add age verification code, it’s still open source and can be patched out rather easily (e.g. be replaced by code that just does “isAdult = true; return isAdult;” without any online spyware verification systems behind it, and the modifications can then be distributed by anyone, anywhere, anyhow and be applied by all users of that software.

This age verification stuff is only really broadly applicable within the context of proprietary software where users have zero control over what the software does and have to use it exactly like packaged (although there are probably workarounds even in that case). Worst case scenario is that they’ll realize this and as a result not scrap the whole idea or make an exception for open source, but instead try to make open source software illegal simply because it can’t be enforced there. But that would of course prompt such a major backlash world-wide that they won’t achieve anything with that except make themselves look silly. But you never know what those politicians and lawyers are smoking next…

Ignorance will never save you.

What does he mean by required? This law would apply to a tiny fraction of users - no one in my continent for example. I hope he understands there’s no way it should be required for everyone.

The ending content is pretty level-headed about this. Basically, “wait for a legal consult/directives from Arch Linux before implementing anything.” That seems like the most prudent thing to do.

You guys hear a lot

They already rolled it back.

Then why don’t they require age verification in this new law, only a method for the user to enter any date (without forcing them to enter one)?

Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it wasn’t systemd.

Except that this change doesn’t lock us into age verification at all. On its own it’s harmless. There are still steps ahead before it’s actually difficult to evade. And sure, we are heading that way and it only makes sense to be prepared for the steps towards the next steps of age verification laws. It really isn’t magic to comply with these small steps, as long as they themselves don’t present a treat, be aware of the bigger picture and still do the work to prevent the actual OS-level age verification.

If it means nothing, then why adding it?

Because some OS vendors based in the US might have to comply with the law, if you like it or not. System76 or RedHat will not have a choice unless the laws will get repelled.

Again, it has nothing to do with systemd, and they aren’t enforcing anything. You’re just making shit up to get angry at. They are only providing a place to put the information that users (distro providers) can collect (or not collect) and use however they want. You should be grateful systemd is doing because I can’t imagine how ridiculous whatever solution all the lazy activists complaining about it would think up. It would ofc be no solution because the only thing those people can do is performative outrage from the top of the Dunning Kruger curve. If the next law enforces verification it still won’t be systemd’s problem because the only thing forcing end users to provide that info will be the distro providers, not systemd.

Also just because it’s such an hilariously vapid argument against this PR, I fully endorse and support systemd adding a skin color data field. No distro will ask me to set it, no program will try to read it, and I will make it “kumquat”.

Hello, I’m currently setting up a nodeBB forum with some federated Communities. I wanted to test out how this post will work throughout the other instances. If you would be kind enough to leave a comment to see if it works, I’d appreciate it. :)

Woohoo forums!!

Sorry I don’t have an answer to your question at the moment but I just would like to add that I, too am implementing activitypub in my blog and if you’d like to chat my DMs are open :)