Support Ageless Linux and John McCardle

I have a naive belief that I refuse to surrender: no good act should be illegal. William Blackstone said: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. As a layman when it comes to the law, I don't want to argue about the particulars of interpreting laws, or what the legal system "would really do", or navigate loopholes. My stance can be summarized like this:

if a good deed can be framed as illegal, the laws it violates must be struck down.

Call me crazy, but that's obvious, right? Have we as citizens lost all grip on our legislators and society itself that we can't prevent good deeds from being criminalized? I get that writing laws carefully can be difficult, but isn't that the specialization of legislators? Shouldn't they be good at it?

Here's my good deed: empowering kids to compute. Since the 1970s, access to computers has exploded, but in the last two decades, we've been hiding the act of computing inside of "apps". That the smartphone is a computer - and an incredible one at that - eludes far too many people. Kids should be given devices that they want to, and are encouraged to, disassemble, rebuild, and extend. Putting a computer in a kid's hand that teaches them how to engage with our digital society is an unmitigated good, and if that's illegal then lock me up, right now.

Which is why these laws aggravated me enough to write this website. It's easy to comply when you are an enormous corporation with an army of lawyers. That their datacenters are endlessly abuzz with contributions from open source contributors never crossed their minds when their lobbying arms scribbled these drafts to mail to every state legislature. We're not at the end of technology. The need for the open source community is not over just because LLMs are good at several things now.

Kids don't need apps, they need access to the programs. The app store mentality of "protecting" users from technical details is being legislatively extended to the operating system. Ageless Linux is my excuse to make what I've wanted to make for a while - "click to download" convenience like an app store, but without the byzantine build processes or walled garden checkpoints. It doesn't matter to me if the users are kids or adults: I want the user to use their device in accordance with their own beliefs.

I dabble with technology as my schedule allows.
In a nutshell, you should know this stuff about me:

I'm an Air Force veteran. Straight out of high school until 2012. I went to Ground Radio school and learned to repair Vietnam era radios. When the AFSCs were refactored, I became a Client Systems troop. I'm lucky to have worked on everything from printer configs and telephone punch blocks to the occasional switch, router, and Linux box. I kicked the Windows habit by installing Debian on a laptop and going on deployment, and I've never looked back.

From 2012 to 2022 I was an IT certification instructor, mostly Linux+.

I'm the current president of my amateur radio club.

McRogueFace is a C++ game engine and distribution of Python. My goal is to write games on grids with high performance, send demos by zipping up the folder, usually just 15-20 megs, and not put in a "skill ceiling" for development. Since it's Python, McRogueFace can do all sorts of genuine AI experiments in the same environment users would normally perceive as just being a video game. I was actually working on a submission to 7 Day Roguelike 2026 with McRogueFace while writing the first versions of Ageless Linux's site.

Bespoke Robot Society is a loose association of robotics contributors. You can get plans for a ~$20 robot on github. I designed the chassis and PCB, wrote the demo code, and I run the wiki.

I have two kids I love with all my heart. This is the message I want to send to them with Ageless Linux:

I don't want to raise scofflaws. Call me old fashioned, but I can't shake the expectation that "illegal" and "wrong" should have a strong correlation, as should "legal" and "right". When we teach kids that you have to lie to the computer to make it go, they internalize something about their society that's different from what I want my kids to learn.

I want them to say I wasn't a coward. It's easy to say that the risk is too great for me, and somebody else should take the lead. I can't stand up to everyone that needs standing up to right now. This is something I felt intersected enough with my expertise to put my foot down. Doing the right thing is more important than avoiding all risk.

Nobody else is coming to save us. If you see something, say something. Every Airman is a sensor. If you're looking around and there doesn't seem to be an adult in the room, then you have just been promoted. The bystander effect is something we need to actively fight against.

But, "us" is a lot of people! I'm already touched by the positive feedback and offers of support from the Linux community. Thanks for the motivation. I could have stayed silent, and kept my rage to myself. But now I feel like there's a community that has my back. That's way better than watching the collapse of civil society and wondering why nobody does anything.

Democracy depends on free speech. Some have said in discussion threads or my comment box that breaking the law opens me up to risk. I think the bigger risk is a society where speaking at all is considered a luxury for the rich who can afford scriptwriters and legal defense. In a world where "speech" is almost entirely a digital interaction, we cannot allow legislators, hardware manufacturers, and four websites that make up almost all of the internet to unilaterally decide what speech is permissible.

Patreon: John McCardle Solders and Hacks

YouTube: @johnmccardle