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Comment by stevenalowe | Hacker News Reader

There’s nothing “overboard” about pushing back on unnecessary political meddling. The operating system does not need to know your date of birth (or identity! Looking at you Micro$oft) in order to manage your hardware and software. The need to know is zero, and given the 1st Amendment I question that any political entity has the legitimate authority to compel one to alter software, open source or otherwise.

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I think the "overboard" part is that the developer was doxxed and received death threats.

that is definitely overboard :(

It's funny how people completely miss the meat of your post.

Political entities do not have the authority to compel this kind of activity. If you go along with it, you are given them a reason to keep going. You have to look at this from a rights perspective.

> It was to be expected that some members of the community would object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly hostile. Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats.

I think we can agree this is overboard

> I think we can agree this is overboard

Yeah it’s not like these people are IRC operators or something!

The operating system does not need to know your full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained. They added an extra optional field for the date of birth.

> Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats.

I see.

> full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained.

maybe we should complain

Why, it's fine to have these values in a corporate environment: name, work email, office location. I'd be fine with an ability to store the birth date, the blood type, the zodiac sign, actually an arbitrary list of key-value pairs, as long as it's optional.

It's only a problem when the OS insists on recording your private information to let you access your private account.

It is an optional field, and so far there is no software that asks for this information, let alone insists on it.

which is the logical next legislative step

unfortunately the article does not mention who is responsible for the alleged misinformation campaign

I doubt it has been top-down coordinated. So what do you expect the article to say?

Then “campaign” was not the correct word to describe it. It's like calling any group of people an “organization”.

I mean your original comment is an example of the misinformation being spread around.

How is “they do not have this authority” misinformation?

> systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained.

GECOS in 1962, and UNIX in '70s had them as well, and nobody threatened to kill their creators.

Having a field in a database is not equal to mandatory data collection. Let me remind of data that /etc/passwd allows to store on even an OS without systemd:

- User's full name (or application name, if the account is for a program)

- Building and room number or contact person

- Office telephone number

- Home telephone number

- Any other contact information (pager number, fax, external e-mail address, etc.)

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