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.
As far as I can tell the Name Email and location are all voluntarily provided by the user.
So is birthDate.
This is something that will be used whether you want it to or not (that makes it invasive) because of the laws around it (of course depending on where you are).
How? First and most importantly, systemd doesn’t do anything to enforce, require or verify the field.
Second, I control what is installed on my PC, that’s the ENTIRE POINT of using a FOSS OS. The FREEDOM to install whatever I want, or not. If there is an application that is using that field to enforce some bs law, then I simply won’t install it.
This isn’t Windows, there isn’t a Microsoft to force you to install software updates that you don’t want. You’re FREE to not install software that does things that you don’t like. This includes any hypothetical future software that would require this field or validate this field.
Beyond All Reason (Total Annihilation community clone) is excellent and FOSS
Dwarf Fortress is free also (the Steam version is just a tile pack and some UI changes, Dwarf Fortress tile packs are legion)
I swear we’re in a post-reality reality.
There are dozens of us… in our labs printing zippers
The people that you’re looking for are politicians and companies like Meta who spend tens of millions of dollars to push these laws.
Not the random developer who created a PR to add an optional JSON field.
The ironic thing here is that this isn’t even the guy that accepted the merge request… that’s the person who actually added the code to the project. Anybody can submit a PR.
I’m completely with you on age verification. It’s pointless and harmful.
I’m not with anyone who supports a harassment campaign on a developer.
The government’s wants are not in the PR. The PR is an optional JSON field.
The field isn’t dangerous, you’re conflating two different things.
The age verification laws are the threat, not an optional text field or the developer who added it.
Looks like you’re trying to fuck someone over too.
Would you care to post your real name, place of work and the city and state where you live? I mean if you don’t want people to retaliate for fucking them over, then don’t fuck them over.
Or, do you understand the danger of having unhinged people on the Internet paint you as a target?
It paints him as an active danger, puts his picture on a wanted poster, includes his full name, workplace and the city and state where he lives and then writes up an article like an after action report of a cyberattack.
It then implies that he’s going to do it again and that he can’t be persuaded and so will be ‘harder to stop’.
Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money. Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again. That’s the true believer pattern. The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.
So if he’s done a bad thing, he’s going to do it again, and you can’t persuade him.
If you can’t read the implied call to action then you’re being deliberately dense.
You should read the article and understand the difference between a comparison and Whataboutism.
I swear nobody has read The Lord of the Rings…
You fail to make your point and when someone points out the failure of rationality, you just say ‘you just don’t get it’.
I think maybe ‘you just don’t get’ how to support your position.
Sorry Chairman Kim
You’re right.
“What if <insert dystopian scenario that hasn’t happened>?” is a silly argument.
Yes, you’re right.
This story was written to turn a developer in a villain. You are uncritically accepting the framing and supporting a harassment campaign.
I also don’t think you can compare computing in a professional setting in the 1960s to modern day surveillance states.
My point was that the fields themselves are no more dangerous than we make them. The GECOS fields are not a thing that used to exist in the 1960s, they exist in your system in 2026.
My point was that the criticism here isn’t about the field, because there are way ‘worse’ fields that have existed for decades. The criticism is about the law and this is a kind of misplaced activisim. Where it goes wrong is deliberately targeting one person for harassment as if they are the scapegoat for all of these age verification laws.
I can also say as a parent there’s only one thing protecting your kid from the internet and its not whatever poorly standardized notion of Linux parental controls that exist today. Only actual parenting can.
I completely agree. These laws are worthless for their stated goals because, as you’ve said, it is a parenting problem.
As for the developer’s publicly observable commits and the following publicly available criticism of it, you can call it painting a target but I think even that’s a bit of a stretch.
They photoshopped his face on a mugshot like he’s a criminal and in the article they list his full name, job title, place of work and the state and city where he works. They also list his personal blog.
In addition to all of the personal details, the wording and framing of the article make it sound like an after action report on a cyberattack
Here’s some select quotes. This isn’t about activisim about a law, this is about painting a person as evil, bad, etc (and if you look at the comments in this post, that framing worked.
He hit three separate projects in one week.
Taylor believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him harder to stop than someone acting for money.
The argument is ideological, so persuasion is off the table.
“He’s going to be hard to stop and you can’t persuade him”
The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious:
Taylor already has the resume line and knows the codebase well enough to try again.
“He’s going to do it again!”
This kind of framing against a person is dangerous. If you stir up enough people on the Internet you’re going to stir up some people who are unstable and willing to act on this violent framing.
I agree that the laws are wrong, but this kind of personal attack is far, far more immediately dangerous.
Ask yourself, if it was your picture in the mugshot and your personal address being plastered all over Reddit would you feel safe?
Well, acktually, the correct word is collaborator
Oh, great argument. Now explain why that justifies violence.
It is optional, 100% local, under the user’s control and does not prevent other software from functioning as expected.
If it ever is not, then you can simply fork the project at or before that change.
It is using systemd, yes. It could be using openRC, sysvinit, runit, etc just as easily.
Systemd isn’t a requirement for Linux. It is simply the most useful init system currently. If that ever stops being the case then changing init systems or entire even distros is a fairly trivial task. If systemd were ever to require me to submit to a 3rd party verification of my age I’d just use a different init system.
There is nothing that any open source project can do that would force me to keep using their software if I don’t want to.
If your opinion represents a large group of people then you should have no trouble maintaining a fork.