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Comment by user_7832

18 hours ago

Honestly, like the Left-pad incident [1], getting things to go suddenly dark is extremely effective at getting people to drop everything else to fix an issue.

Ideally, getting these servers to auto turn off the day this goes into effect ("In compliance with this new law, Linux is now temporarily unusable. Please <call to action>.") would be glorious for getting the bill staved off, or killed.

It would hurt some productivity, but that is a risk these lawmakers taking donations are probably willing to make.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

7 comments

user_7832

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edgyquant  17 hours ago

It would make people move quickly to use a forked version of the kernel and would be an all around blunder by the Linux foundation

  • user_7832  15 hours ago

    My comment was half in jest (I wasn't super serious about it.) In another sibling comment below I wrote how it's still possible to leverage this without actually implementing it.

user_7832  15 hours ago

Side note, this comment is evidently quite controversial, it went from +3 to +1. If anyone is angry at me I would like to assuage them that I am not, in fact, any owner or maintainer of anything in the linux distribution system.

voidUpdate  17 hours ago

"some"? It would hurt a lot of productivity lol. If all linux boxes turned themselves off suddenly, I think the internet would fall over pretty fast. I dont know how much of the internet runs on windows or apple (or others), but I cant imagine it's very much

  • user_7832  15 hours ago

    > It would hurt a lot of productivity lol.

    I know. That's exactly the point.

    In such situations where one party (Meta) has enough money to lobby and is playing dirty, it's a massively asymmetric situation. In such cases, if you really want to make sure you're heard (which I'm not sure distributers want or care about tbh), you've got to play the game too.

    Malicious compliance, if you will.

    PS: For a "practical" variant, simply a warning might be sufficient - given how many hospitals/critical infra uses linux. For eg "There is a chance this server will fail to work on x date due to this y law. Not as glamorous/all-guns-blazing, but probably much more sensible and practical.

    PPS: For an even more "safer" variant, one could go "Post x, please note that using linux/this server is a violation of law y. Please turn off the server yourself manually. Failure to comply with these instructions and violating the law will be borne entirely by the (no informed) sysadmin/manglement.

    • voidUpdate  15 hours ago

      Most hospitals I know of, at least in the UK, still use windows, its why WannaCry was such a big deal here