During our in-person visa appointment in Seattle, a shooting involving CBP occurred just a few parking spaces from where we normally park for medical outpatient visits back in Portland. It was covered by the news internationally and you may have read about it. Moments like that have a way of clarifying what matters and how urgently change can feel necessary.

Our visas were approved quickly, which we’re grateful for. We’ll be spending the next year in France, where my wife has other Tibetan family. I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the language and culture and to taking that responsibility seriously. Learning French in mid-life will be humbling, but I’m ready to give it my full focus.

Sounds like a splendid person.

It’s also a smart move considering that, with age-verification laws advancing, it looks like a good part of the Linux world will become with time another instrument of mass surveillance.

entered a permanent worldwide injunction

💪 🤝

Luckily I can still share this here. Indeed, many thanks to the mods of this community for not deleting this.

I don’t think enough developers realize that the majority of users does not want this. They’re acting exactly like the legislators: “we don’t give a shit about what the people think”.

The legislators won’t take the Linux community seriously, because the developers aren’t taking the community seriously either.

In the Community thread of https://discuss.kde.org/

It isn’t a threat, anymore than their decisions are threats. I suppose the developers give at least a minimum of weight to what the users think, so why shouldn’t we politely say what we think and explain why?

You’re right about posting in the Kubuntu forums. However, I now see that surprisingly there’s only one post about age verification in KDE Discuss, and only one on Kubuntu forums. So I feel that they’re simply blocking posts about this topic. In one of said posts there was a link to another related post, which apparently has been deleted.

In principle I agree with you, pacific discussion and democracy should be the way to go. But it seems that “discussion” doesn’t lead anywhere these times. Politicians do whatever they like (or what lobbies tell them to do), without checking if the majority of the population really agree with some decisions. A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.

I fear that riots will start on a larger scale. Even if the context today is different, the situation reminds me somewhat of what happened with the 1981 riots in Toxteth, in Brixton, and other previous riots. Unjust or misused laws; deafness of authorities about discontent; innocent and not-so-innocent people getting hurt.

Of course there are no obligations and he’s’free to do as he pleases. Likewise, the community or I are under no obligations of not criticizing him for what he chose to do.

He did not just suggest it. He went on and implemented it. All while the community was telling him “we don’t want this”, “stop with this” – look at the comments on GitHub. Yet he neglected all this feedback.

As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right? If you go ahead while the community is telling you “we don’t want this”, then whom are you working for?

He got a huge amount of criticisms and negative comments from the community while he was working on this on GitHub; look at the comment thread of his implementation on GitHub. Essentially the community was telling him “we don’t want this”. And who are you working for in a FOSS project, if not for the community? Yet he disregarded the comments and went on.

On top of this, he appeared out of the blue with this implementation. He had not made any pull requests to this git before now. Nobody had assigned this task to him.

So the situation is not that this is some employee who was asked to implement something, and did it without knowing what the feedback would have been.

1. He didn’t draw any straw. Nobody asked him to work on such an implementation (or maybe Meta did?).
2. In fact, he appeared out of the blue to do this implementation. This was his very first pull request on the Systemd git.
3. From the very start he received a huge amount of critical comments from the community on GitHub, while he was working on this. He neglected their criticism and plowed on.

So he already had a warning that the majority of the community didn’t agree on what he was doing. Nobody asked him to. He chose to continue – he could have imagined the consequences.

And the whole context on why and why now he did this is fishy.

Brilliant! 💪

Nobody paid him to do this. He’s a cloud engineer who read the law and decided someone needed to implement it.

Well, how do you know that?

Didn’t know this, thanks for the info!

Absolutely true, I was sloppy in my writing. Edited.

Super!

I was wondering the same. I have an extremely old Android that’s dying, and as soon as it does I’ll look for devices with that can run GrapheneOS. As @[email protected] says, it seems Pixel is the only one for now, and possibly one needs a slightly older model as well. That’s what I’ll look for.

Agree. In fact, even projects that do have ties to those regions. Free & open-source is a stance.

This should be a post on its own in some appropriate communities. Completely agree with you.