The latest changes implemented in the Systemd repo, related to or prompted by age-verification laws, have made many people unhappy (I suppose links about this aren’t necessary). This has led to a surge in Systemd forks during the last days (“surge” because there have always been plenty of forks). Here are some forks that explicitly mention those changes as their reason for forking (rough time ordering taken from the fork page):
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paramazo/systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager without age verification”
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ganitam/systemd “Systemd fork just before the Age Verification addition. Hoping more capable developers and maintainers do same…”
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GSYT-Productions/systemd-fork “The systemd System and Service Manager, without the stupid Age Verification”
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speedythesnail/unret arded-systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager, without the ret arded age-verification commits”
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ta13579/systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager WITHOUT THE FUCKING AGE CHECKS”
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r4shsec/systemd-no-age-verification “This is systemd but without the age verification made via pull request https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40978”
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Pingasmaster/fightthesystemd “Systemd without the nonsense: no age verification, no lighthouse built-in.”
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Jeffrey-Sardina/system “Liberated systemd – no surveillance. Ever.”
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HaplessIdiot/systemd-saneagecheck “The systemd System and Service Manager with age verification bypass and polling rate options for said feature”
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Queer-Coded-LGBTQ/systemd-fuck-california “The systemd System and Service Manager, but without age bs added in.”
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Codiak540/unshitted-systemd “A fork of systemd aiming to strip the Age verification. Sue me california.”
Hopefully the energy of this reaction won’t be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.
Systemd still has no age verification, so all those forks are absolutely pointless.
If and when Systemd adds age verification, I’ll move away from it.
But the recent change adds literally nothing. Just leave the field blank, like you always did with those for your home address and full name.
The age field is malicious compliance. It satisfies the letter of the law while being completely and deliberately useless for its purpose.
It doesn’t work quite that way. Typically you have a sequence of very small changes, all “innocuous”, that lock you more and more into the previous ones. When you suddenly realize that the cumulative change is bad, you also find it’s very difficult to “move away from it”. This is why it’s important not to give away a single inch, from the very start.
That’s simply not true in this case.
With age verification, there’s a very clear cut-off point that you can see and act upon:
Age verification is when you’re required to verify your age.
Not just enter a number.
And the way to fight against this law isn’t to “boycott” systemd.
Literally no one will notice. It’s free, so using it doesn’t support it.
And no one even knows whether you use it or not.
That’s why I think the law is bad, but it doesn’t really apply to open source software. You see the actual limit crossed, you can still fork the version from before that.
Even the law itself, as it stands, is pretty alright. It’s effectively just a parental control system, the OS needs to provide the user age to applications, but that age is just whatever you type at install, without any verification. In general, if enough applications implement it, that’s not a bad system to help protect kids without invading anyones privacy. Of course, it can be circumvented by the kid installing the OS themselves, but that possibility is a feature, not a bug.
The problem there is the slippery slope though.
I think there is an intention to convey a clear message. I will be warching the distro’s. Red Hat, being an IBM company, will probably back this age verification farce. I’m not so sure about the community distro’s like Debian or Arch. Maybe even Ubuntu will stop short.
Despite being a minor technical feature, I think this will have a disproportionate response from people.
The age field is one step closer to age verification in a program that already has made it more than clear that they don’t respect their consumers. Not only that but it also opens the door for other distro’s to force age verification.
This is nonsense. Do you feel like having a “user name” field brings “real ID one step closer”? Just don’t fill that field or enter some bogus data - nobody is checking this.
Could you elaborate on this? I don’t get it.
Systemd isn’t going to add age verification
!remindme 1 year
This isn’t Reddit
/whoosh
I don’t know why we downvoted the correct answer.
It sucks and is stupid but the alternative is banning Linux. You wanna have ICE knock on your door for “harboring a foreign operating system that doesn’t comply with the Christlike values of patriotic Americans”?
Good. Have it banned in the one state that probably relies on it the absolute most. Silicon Valley would start to implode and the law would be changed very quickly.
They will not ban it on Servers or for Corporate use, but ban it in youth Centers, in schools, in public libraries, and everywhere else where kids could have access to Computers. This will create another generation of people who only know close source Systems, most likely from Microsoft, who will have no issues with making their Systems compliant to the bindig laws.
That’s the thing, the law doesn’t differentiate.
as far as I read the law, but i am neither a lawyer or even american, are those Option only needed for Systems with users and a user, as defined by the same law, is
(i) “User” means a child that is the primary user of the device.
The law says nothing about Systems that don’t have such a “user”, or at least i could not find anything.
So, there could be a valid argument that the law does differentiate.
Systems have to be ready and in place when the law becomes bindig and active, it is to late to beginn with the work then.