this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I disagree with age verification as well, but attacking a person like this is gross.
This article is all but brigading people into harassing this guy.
He got a huge amount of criticisms and negative comments from the community while he was working on this on GitHub; look at the comment thread of his implementation on GitHub. Essentially the community was telling him "we don't want this". And who are you working for in a FOSS project, if not for the community? Yet he disregarded the comments and went on.
On top of this, he appeared out of the blue with this implementation. He had not made any pull requests to this git before now. Nobody had assigned this task to him.
So the situation is not that this is some employee who was asked to implement something, and did it without knowing what the feedback would have been.
Spreading his face around doctored as if it were a mugshot in a community where people are calling him a traitor and other things is a recipe for someone to be hurt or killed.
This thread isn't a community discussion about implementing a feature, it's people trying to whip up a mob to attack a person. It doesn't matter how much you dislike the field name he added to a JSON document, you don't stir up a mob that can lead to people getting hurt.
Yeah no how about fuck that. Politics is personal.
If you're participating in a lynch mob then I believe you're responsible for what happens.
If you don't see a problem with this, please provide us a picture of your face, full name and place of work.
Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don't deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don't get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.
Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can't. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.
A spade's a spade. This is malicious compliance. The law might be the problem here but it's on us to resist and try to make a change. Every last one of us. After all, the surveillance state workers in China and Russia are all just doing their jobs right?
Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?
Who cares? What does having a Date of Birth field do that would harm you?
Sure, it sounds super scary that some evil corporation would be able to use the data in the birthdate field to locate you. It would be even more scary if they had your realName and location. If your realName and location was stored in your user account then the evil corporation, who has access to modern data brokers, would also be able to determine your birthdate and all kinds of other information about you.
We don't have to wait to see how this hypothetical dangerous situation would play out, because realName and location have been user fields since the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field
The systemd PR also referred to a flatpak PR who said they had wanted that to allow for parental controls even before the law came. That's a somewhat reasonable use case, in my opinion.
Have you?