this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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I'll start off my comment with something everyone can agree on: the age verification laws absolutely sucks. It's a surveillance law masquerading as a means of "protecting" children. It also completely undermines free and open source projects, and therefore, protected speech. The fact systemd had to add a
BirthDatefield is unfortunate, however, I would blame the lawmakers for creating the law that the developers of systemd now have to comply with.I'm okay with the implementation. It is an optional (meaning you have to add it yourself) field which only specifies the date of birth. It doesn't seem to be at all invasive, nor does it attempt to "verify" it at the moment. Granted, anything is possible, but I don't think there's a good enough reason why systemd would EVER feel the need to add age verification. Before you say anything regarding corporations, please answer this: why would a corporation add age verification to a system manager their servers depend on? How will that profit them?
I get why people are angry, but I think this anger should be funneled towards the lawmakers pulling off nonsense like this. Fight those who are actively trying to take your rights away. Bullying software developers for complying to international laws will lead to nothing but hate.
The PR is explicitly for the purpose of complying with age verification laws. Damn fuckin' right I'm angry about it.
Is it cool if we start implementing tools to track users' race and sexual orientation for the explicit purpose of complying with some country's laws about those too? Or is it maybe the job of free software to defy oppressive systems?
I cannot think of a law which could impact a significant portion of users like Brazil, Colorado or California, which tells operating system providers to store the race or sexual orientation of a person. Unless that time comes, why should they bother implementing that? That, in contrast to a birth date which you may provide, is complying in advance to future laws against such people, and is therefore wrong.
Here's a better question: why should we encourage free software developers, who only make money from people donating to the project they are working on, to purposely defy the law and potentially net them a million dollar fine? Are we sending a message, or are we just dooming ourselves?
Homosexual activity is illegal in Uganda. If they pass a law saying your OS should track that, is it moral for developers to enable compliance with it? Or do developers have a moral duty to at least not go out of their way to enable that bullshit, even if they risk a gajillion dollar fine?
Moral duty begins with contribution of any sort imo. But I still agree, this is a law that can and should be ignored. Don't think this pr is put from any actual pressure though yet, more akin to "soft compliance"
I have so many qualms with this comment alone. Concurrently, I am not sure how to articulate them. This text might be a bit messy as a result.
To begin, of course it wouldn't be moral. Purposely complying with discriminatory laws is not at all a good thing. I don't think systemd will even bother adding such a thing, even if it was against the law in Uganda. The difference between a country like Brazil asking for the date of birth for a user and Uganda asking for the user's sexuality is:
I imagine you put thought into your hypothetical to see where it stands, but I would advise putting more thought into it. Stuff like this will drain both our energy.