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Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support (itsfoss.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 82 points 7 months ago (6 children)
  1. Fork a project that you have a problem with;
  2. Write a strong worded manifesto;
  3. Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
  4. Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
  5. Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.
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  • [–] 21 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, but what's wrong with this? If you gather engineers that are capable to maintain it - what is the downside? Systemd could always have used a bit of competition, I think most of us can agree. Most of the forks of systemd will fail, but most of all projects fail after some time. I don't think this situation will harm systemd ultimately and it shouldn't.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago

    There's nothing wrong with forking a project, IF you can and intend to maintain it -- hell, that's the whole basis of FOSS.

    Forking it to make a point with no intention to maintaining it is just an easy way to gather clicks and stir drama.

    IMHO the effort is better spent fighting the politicians that are shoving this down our throats, or should we fork all the tech that gets affected by bad political decisions?

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;

    What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    Forking projects to put a different coat of paint on them is just silly. It's still the same project, it's just got your sticker on it now. You still dependent on upstream decisions. If things change too much for your liking, you have a growing patch management issue on your hands, and that's not fun. But hey, you're free to do it, that's the beauty of FOSS.

    Reminds me of the Linux distros that just fork Debian, stick a new theme and logo, create a website and voilá. Nah, mate, it's still Debian.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

    That sounds super easy on paper. In practice nobody is going to do this long-term.

    The kind of people who get massively upset about this are not the kind of people that are going to make a long term commitment to actually doing anything. Forking systemd is performative activism, that's it.

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