A single pull request turned a quiet open source contributor into the unlikely target of one of the Linux community's most heated controversies. We interacted with Dylan Taylor to hear his side of the story.

I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that.

What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1411·
    12 hours ago

    How does systemd having an optional birthDate field prevent children from having a computer?

    It also has fields for ‘Real Name’ and ‘Location’ (and has since the 1960s) without any problems. Most people don’t even know that they exist because they’re optional.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        163·
        12 hours ago

        Gosh, it’s almost like it’s my opinion and these threads keep popping up for discussion in the communities that I’m a part of.

        I’m not going to pay you for replying to my comments and yet here you are.