For those interested, the Systemd release that’s planned to include the controversial ‘birthDate’ field to user records, complying with age-verification laws, is v261 (see ‘milestone’ in the pull request). This release seems to be planned for May.
The current release, from some hours ago, is v260.1. I see that Ubuntu Noble (24.04) just updated to v255.
You raise a very good point. systemd isn’t the only thing we should be bringing attention to. Everything in the Linux ecosystem that’s pushing for age verification/attestation should have attention brought to it.
Yeah, but also let’s not lose sight of the fact that the SPI (the legal representative and donation distributor for Arch, Debian, Gentoo, LibreOffice, Systemd and a lot of other open source communities) can easily be sued out of existence if they don’t follow the law.
And several large corporations have a big incentive to pursue that.
So there is room for discussion whether a maliciously compliant age field that only the local admin can edit is worse than the death of community-driven Linux development as we know it today.
Maybe this isn’t the hill to die on.
I think everyone should pick their battles, but I’m also happy that there are enough people picking this one. I also don’t think this is the hill to die on and don’t think the anger should be solely focused on the Linux Dev community but should be more focused on the people implementing this law in the first place.
I applaud any devs pushing back against this.
But users harassing, berating or villifying devs just for following the new law can go get fucked.
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