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.

Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

  • quick_snail@feddit.nl
    1·
    6 days ago

    Lawyer up? Who are they going to sue? Most Foss projects are not a legal entity.

    For the few that are (eg connnical) they can just move the org to Canada or Mexico or wherever in Europe that doesn’t have insane laws.

    Everyone continues to work remotely. It’s easy.

    • 2FortGaming@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 days ago

      They will get kicked off Github by Microsoft when they get somthing in the mail by the state of California for hosting content that vilolates the law.

      • quick_snail@feddit.nl
        1·
        6 days ago

        So they push to codeberg. What’s your point?

        Git is decentralized. You’re not citing a problem that can’t be fixed in a few hours.