cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62278765
Software changes for compliance with age-verification laws are being pushed a bit everywhere in Linux-development; for example:
In Systemd, already merged.
In xdg.desktop.portal (a portal frontend service for Flatpak and other desktop containment frameworks), still open.
In Arch Linux, still open.
In Freedesktop.org, still open.
It’s interesting that it’s the same small group of people behind these pull requests, and that discussion threads in them have been locked owing to a great amount of negative criticisms.
They say “we have to comply with the law”. Which also means that if “the law” in the future will require proper verification, handling to 3rd-parties, or whatnot, then they will comply.
Well, it’s their right to. They don’t owe anything to anyone, and are under no obligation to report to users or to the community, nor to pay heed to anybody’s wishes.
If things proceed in this direction, we users may at some point have to choose between privacy-friendly Linux distributions or legal Linux distributions. People who, like me, are worried, need to start thinking about concrete actions to take before it’s too late: where to develop such distros? which channels to download and distribute them from? And so on. (And of course, more generally we need to write and protest to politicians, organize protest marches, go on strike, refuse to comply…)
It’s good to remind to those who keep on repeating the words “legal” and “illegal” that for example Nelson Mandela was, technically speaking, a criminal who did and promoted illegal activity. This happens when laws become immoral.
The problem is where this is going, if you look down the road.
thing is, how the hell are they going to enforce it, even if it does become law?
piracy is illegal, but it’s so widely circumvented that it’s a waste of resources to enforce.
Linux is open source. How do they prevent forks? How do they prevent users from modifying the os?
Yes, that’s the good news. But probably some of the forks or privately-modified OSs will therefore be by definition “illegal”, just like in some countries the wine that you might make from the grapes in your garden is illegal.
I will break the law, with a smile.
The laws may become too wild to support those regions or they will get their own weird distro.
Another outcome is them understanding that it’s lunacy and removing those laws, but I won’t bet on it.