I can confirm it is. I entered Linux, it's been a decade and I'm comfortable. I can't leave, not that I've been given a reason.
It needs to be controlled to make a profit. Once something you love becomes popular the bulldozers will move in.
If the compliant, age-gated version becomes the industry standard, where does that leave the rest of us?
With the distros that don't comply, as always.
This is a very importrant thing to keep in mind. Liberalism is exceptional at appropriation and assimilation, and there is already a tremendous amount of corporate influence on the trajectory of Linux development. Since the open source nature of Linux is fairly robust, this would mean that control would look a lot like accessibility and feature competition (think how Android has effectively muscled out alternative 'open source' mobile OS's and functions as one of the most expansive data collection systems in the world). It likely would not be as immediate as this suggests, for exactly the same reason Linux is so preferable to proprietary operating systems, but examples like Zorin's successful marketing campaign and paid services do point to a trajectory of corporatization separate from what exists in Redhat and Ubuntu.
As liberal states seek more power over information and computing, they will direct regulations into favourable conditions for capitalization, as they always do, and will reward corporations that comply. The big threat is the amount of resources that private capital wields with state support and how this may pressure independent developers to comply as well.
It sucks but at the end of the day, it's not illegal to post code. The code without the nonsense can be seperate from the released system. So if they fuck everyone with age verification and all this other Orwellian crap, you just get the distro "in development" that does not have it integrated yet. Wink wink.
Oh, no it wouldnt be like "we're mandating this through legislation," because that is typically really hard to defend. They're more likely to simply provide subsidies or some sort of financial benefit to larger, more compliant entities.
Systemd is already having to revert an age verification merge because the Linux community flipped shit and the Dev who did it was getting death threats.
I think you're underestimating how much of a problem liberal states are in their use of soft power. I don't doubt that most Linux users and devs would resist, I'm saying that it would definitely be a threat for liberal states to dedicate resources to influencing norms and access. They don't need to "win" as in complete and utter domination of every aspect of development for Linux to have a massive and negative effect. Think about how much more labour the US state has at is disposal than the entirety of the Linux community; how much more resources it has that could be dedicated to the privileging of projects that do comply.
Yes, how to resist is certainly important to consider, but there's no way to design that resistance if you ignore the tools at their disposal. Look at how big Zorin got from just a timely marketing campaign or the fact that corporate- and enterprise-oriented revenue models are already deeply influential on the landscape even without state promotion.
The year of text based only Unix?
People don't care about this beacuse they will make it so that if you don't ask questions it just works.
In the meantime those of us that need to work in these jurisdictions need to comply with the bullshit so we hope to be able to continue to work with linux, but if that won't be possible we will be forced to write software for microsoft or whatever else in the apple crap.
That is why there will be forks for the hobbyists, but for those that need to actually use a computer to make a living, compliance was always the only creal choice.
And as usual some asshole will come with the usual nazi comparison with compliance, like they did in the other seven posts were the subject was discussed. These people can risk their own family but the way they write, they probably aren't even responsible for themselves
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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