this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you'd think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don't like it I'm sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one's freedom is being oppressed here.
Yep. The crypto ticker at the bottom of the page is the cherry on top!
It's literally an optional birthDate field in a place where there's already realName, emailAddress, and location. If you're concerned about privacy, maybe don't expose your real name, email, and location.
And it's not even fucking installed everywhere:
Anybody who is calling this age verification is actively lying to you!
This Sam Bent guy should fucking get bent.
It's brigading harassment on a volunteer dev, the post should be nuked this is just doxxing for ad revenue... disgusting
It was posted by Yσɠƚԋσʂ themselves, who moderates several lemmy.ml communities. I agree it should be nuked, but it's not going to be nuked.
That's good to know, I don't want to be supporting communities which allow this kind of toxic garbage
That isn't really the point. All this nonsense happened without community discussion beforehand.
Who are the community employing? Why do they need consulting before code changes are made?
Your comment is nonsense.
I think what they're saying is https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/ . the nature of open source—atl in accord with the hacker ethic—is that everything is just a passion project, there is no responsibility to not make bad decisions, and bad decisions result in decreased adoption and lost trust. after all, open source has always been about making a new alternative because existing solutions are bad.
So we aren't supposed to talk about or react to said bad decisions? Come on.
nah as an anarchist i am against silence. i'm just saying that in our capitalist society open source maintainers do not in fact have responsibility to the community, only to their market share, and this works slightly less dysfunctionally than proprietary because come what may the opposition may fork it. but that and the transparency and the ability to volunteer your labor for them are the only things that open source does guarantee.
Do you want to post your real name and place of work online for everyone to see or do you understand why that kind of action is dangerous and wrong?
What in the fascist fuck are you talking about
This thread isn't a discussion about a bad decision.
Discussions don't start with putting the developer in a mug shot and posting all of his personal details.
You're probably the same kind of user who has a fit when someone looks at their overview too. I'm just going to block you now.
Yeah, that's way easier than defending this nonsense. Stick your fingers in your ears.
Discussions happen after the PRs in most projects, because there is no point discussing code that ain't there.
And they usually don't get pushed through when discussion is just starting.
My OS should have no details on me besides the account name which didn't necessarily correspond to my real name.
Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they're all optional.
Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.
No Linux as such was not, by the time Linux got popular the big multiuser systems were on their way out. I still worked on those in college. But they were SGI, HP-UX and Sequent. Especially the latter were huge systems.
But these fields were just a clone of what was in the original Unix systems.