The donations for Debian, Arch and a dozen others are collected and distributed by a non-profit that sits in the US, which also represents them legally. If they’re sued into oblivion, the distros have no more money for hosting their repos.
Debian, Ubuntu, most of their derivatives except the niche ones, Arch, Endeavor, Manjaro, Fedora. Basically all major ones.
Mark my words.
He didn’t apply the change, he proposed it.
And there’s zero surveillance in the change he proposed.
Look out, it’s the /pol/ICE
Nothing, and that’s legal, too. The new law only requires a method for putting in an age or birthdate, no age verification.
I applaud any devs pushing back against this.
But users harassing, berating or villifying devs just for following the new law can go get fucked.
Yeah, but also let’s not lose sight of the fact that the SPI (the legal representative and donation distributor for Arch, Debian, Gentoo, LibreOffice, Systemd and a lot of other open source communities) can easily be sued out of existence if they don’t follow the law.
And several large corporations have a big incentive to pursue that.
So there is room for discussion whether a maliciously compliant age field that only the local admin can edit is worse than the death of community-driven Linux development as we know it today.
Maybe this isn’t the hill to die on.
What I don’t understand:
Why is everyone hating on systemd for adding the birthdate field, but no one is bashing xdg-desktop-portal for adding the actual age verification attestation system?
Is it because systemd makes for a better target?
Or because most don’t know what xdg-desktop-portal actually does?
By the way, Freedesktop.org’s Accountsservice is doing the exact same thing for non-systemd users.
Yeah, really easy, just all employees suddenly work for a foreign organisation which pays salary in foreign currency, while they’re still living and expected to pay income tax in the US. Transfers of money and tech are now cross-border and subject to Trump’s Truthed tariffs. All servers have to be transferred to different hosts, all SPF records need to be changed, all contact info updated.
Nothing difficult at all, it’s all really easy.
But hey, they avoided putting an empty data field in their OS, and with their 1% market share they sure sent a strong signal that’ll get lawmakers who have never even heard of Linux to reconsider.