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Comment by huimang | Hacker News Reader

So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this?

E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

That commit message mentions laws from California, Colorado, and Brazil. Today’s article is only about how the Californian law is inapplicable. It seems to me that the feature is still valid.

also, it's a complete stub that does zero of interest.

Stub code that doesn't do anything sounds like a great candidate for removal.

This IS systemd we’re talking about.

Dead code? No, no. "That is not dead which can eternal lie..."

Correct. For example, Illinois’ draft law has no open source exception.

Colorado has a similar carve-out. I can't comment on Brazil, though.

The PR mentions not just California but other states and countries, so I dont think California's exemption alone changes the situation

Perhaps the controversy created by these pull requests is partially responsible for bringing attention to the issue and resulting in change to the legislation.

I'm confused why systemd would even do this? I'm not advocating for "breaking the law", but it's just completely absurd that this project would be prosecuted for anything... The general public as no idea what systemd even is and nor do they care. And 1st amendment free speech seems like enough to protect them.

What am I missing here?

Man that PR is a complete mess.

why?

It’s 150 comments of back and forth on a change which doesn’t have a concrete reason, the maintainers aren’t in agreement on what the right approach is wrt the field’s behaviour, and the person who submitted it is bouncing between saying he’s keeping it on topic and then adding scope where he believes it should be added.

I also personally disagree with the change, I think the OP has gone ahead and implemented what they wanted but not considered the actual ways it will be used. The PR shouldn’t be merged until the laws have made a bit more progress and it’s clear what they’re _actually_ implementing.

That's the facebookisation or redditisation of open source. Open source used to mean when you got the software you got the source code, but now it means a platform for arguing. And there's no doubt in my mind when people say they can't switch their project from GitHub to Forgejo because they'd lose "contributions", they mean this.

I don't understand your point. The phrase "when you got the software it got the source code" makes no sense. And arguments were just as common decades ago on forums, mailing lists, and IRC. What exactly are you trying to say?

you went to openssh.org and downloaded openssh. no feedback channel. And long before that, you wrote to request a DECtape in the mail.

I would never look at a person's github account to evaluate them. The most important things people do will be proprietary, or if they contribute to serious projects will be in that project's gitlab/forgejo's instance.

I don’t think this is anything new. There’s been massive blow ups for as long as we’ve been doing this - NetBSD and OpenBSD was a massive, public falling out as was the gnome 3 release, or the python 3 release.

For WSL, there will still need to be a passthrough.

But California could adopt some of Colorado’s language about containerization:

"COVERED APPLICATION STORE" DOES NOT INCLUDE: (I) A CODE REPOSITORY PROVIDER; (II) A CONTAINERIZED SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTION; OR (III) AN ONLINE SERVICE OR PLATFORM THAT DISTRIBUTES ANY OF THE FOLLOWING APPLICATIONS IF THE APPLICATION RUNS EXCLUSIVELY WITHIN A SEPARATE HOST APPLICATION: (A) AN EXTENSION; (B) A PLUG-IN; (C) AN ADD-ON; OR (D) ANY OTHER SOFTWARE APPLICATION.

I have no problem with that as long as it's not the government controlling the age verification. It should be a parent. And as a parent I want the ability to properly control my children's devices - the fact that Apple, and especially Google pretty much ignored this feature until now is a big part of why we have these dumb laws in the first place.

Think about it - if every phone you got asked you at first config "are you over 18? If not ask a parent to set up this device" then everyone would know about that capability and "think of the children" would be met with "parents can just click a button"...

> And as a parent I want the ability to properly control my children's devices

    * https://www.apple.com/uk/child-safety/
    * https://families.google/familylink/
    * https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/family-safety

You already have the ability, all parents do, that some (or most) haven't is why this crap gets proposed in the first place and used as a justification for invading everyone's privacy.

If (some) parents actually parented instead of abdicating that role to the state/education system then this tripe would get far less traction - though cynically they'd just switch to the other argument they always trot out.

Yes, if everyone did everything correctly every time in perpetuity, we wouldn’t need laws. Very astute observation.

Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out that way so far.

Oh no, some people are terrible at cooking. Better ban cooking without a license. Giving your neighbor a home baked pie is now a crime unless you're a licensed pastry chef.

That’s correct. We only need one law. Restaurant food poisoned you? NAP violation.

Even that might be too much. As you’ve insightfully illustrated, 1 law is a slippery slope to infinite laws. Next thing you know we need a license to toast bread in our own damn toasters.

i mean, we know people are terrible at driving, so we give them license.

We know poeople are terrible with guns so we...um..try to protect their freedom to be terrible.

These arguments are about values not control gates.

We don't need most laws.

I thank my concerned parents for locking down my computer as a young teen, for giving me motivation to study computer security in detail :)

California AB1043 is the only reason that app providers have to give a shit about whether parental controls are enabled btw. Before these laws, most apps were openly ignoring parental controls.

Why does birthdate trigger y'all so much, but physical location (literally the field right before it, that you can see in the diff context) doesn't? Shouldn't we be protesting even harder against systemd tracking our physical location?

There's little use protesting free things. But you can run Linux without systemd entirely. Void is a pretty good experience, for example.

Didn't physical location exist back when mainframes were a thing? Unix users would use it to find others IRL. Usually you wouldn't mind other users of the mainframe being able to visit you, that was the purpose of the field. But birth date? There are not really any genuine uses for that being at the system level. It's being used exclusively to add restrictions and lock things down, and that's exactly the kind of thing Free Software is not-for.

There’s no legislation coercing that field. systemd is doing what GECOS and chfn and .plan allow, but OS vendors are free to remove GECOS, chfn or .plan support.

Systemd is paid for by Big Business, so they will retain user-identification information in the long run of course. Poettering will never revert what he is paid for by the TechBros.

The vast majority of all commits to Linux were paid for by big business (around 85% last year, prev years similar). Intel, Google, AMD, IBM, Meta….

https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributor...

Can you provide a link to your own business-free init system that you wrote?

Why not just have it be one of the 85 million reasons to not use systemd? Is always been awful.

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