this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Please stop with the personal attacks on open source maintainers.
Developers are not a protected class. They do not get special social protections when they do ignorant things.
The key phrase is Personal Attack.
If the law was the only thing stopping you doing that, it reflects on you.
Any criticism should be directed primarily at the laws, not the person who suggested adding a birthdate field to the user.json.
Open source is dependent on volunteers contributing their time. The developers at SystemD have been receiving death threats over this. This article includes his name, face, workplace. I know that information is publicly available but the Geoguessr experts aren't the people we need to worry about.
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?
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.
This isn't criticism.
Taking a person, photoshopping their picture to look like a dossier on a criminal and writing a hit piece which includes all of their publicly available information is doxxing for the purpose of harassment.
Lemmy is a small community, read some of the comments in this post and you'll see people using violent language, calling him a traitor, etc.
I didn't even have to go far to find an example, literally the comment under my reply:
https://lemmy.world/post/44550728/22802099
Expand that to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit (where this exact article is also posted) and the chances of some crazy person going out and doing harm to this man increases.
This is why public doxxing is wrong and anyone participating in this is morally corrupt.
The correct word is collaborator, btw. Sticking up for him doesn’t look good, either.
Oh, great argument. Now explain why that justifies violence.
You are the one talking violence.
Stop trying to make what he did ok. It is not ok.
So maybe next time when someone sees a pull-request like this, they think before merging it?
*provided no one gets hurt. I sympathise with the uproar, but physically hurting the guy is definitely too much
Another collaborator.
He didn't have to do this. If he wants to do his part to make everyone else's life worse, then he will have to face the consequences for it.
Seriously. Lemmy is kinda gross with this stuff.
This change is shit but I'm not a fan of personal attacks on the guy.