this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Surely systemd is going to roll back Dylan's change, right?
Can you explain in detail, what exactly that change did?
They added a voluntary field for date of birth. Very controversial. Not at all like the address field that had been there for years or realname. Those are completely uncontroversial somehow. Unfortunately it got added during all this uncertainty with all the user I'd government overreach. And people lost their everloving minds claiming it was some sinister forced Id check. It was not. But all the craze around it launched tens of already dead systemD forks.
Worth mentioning that California's and Brazil's age verification laws were cited as a motivating factor in the pull request, the pull request ~~author~~ merger works for Microsoft and the author also did similar pull requests in other open source projects.
Edit: it was the PR merger that works for Microsoft, not the PR author.
So he made several mistakes as part of a co-ordinated jumping the gun on boot throating, AND he's getting paid to make open source software worse?
The author does not work for Microsoft, nor he did add this field to “other open source projects”: https://dylanmtaylor.com/posts/2026-03-25-my-first-contribution-to-systemd
People just love to hate anything systemd related.
My bad, it was the PR merger that works for Microsoft, not the author.
Yes he did. He did several PRs using/collecting that field:
Agree, and I actually like systemd, but I don't see the relantionship between that and my comment.
Well, yeah, because they added it because of the law. That's not speculation, they said that's why they did. I agree, if it was there before it wouldn't have been out of place, I totally get you, but they said that it's something they should add because it might be required by law in the future.
Probably doesn't help there's also the existing fault line of 'an init system shouldn't be doing x', systemd was always a magnet for partisanship.
There will always be people thinking X shouldn't do y. But you're not wrong. Plenty of people absolutely just look for any reason to attack
Not to mention death threats and whatnot
I wonder if Linux had been included in the law, would it have criminalised lying in your profile demographics
It wasn’t the timing. People love to hate systemd for the dumbest reasons.
Certainly. They set the precedent that open source software should capitulate immediately to any authoritarian demand.
EDIT : I guess people haven't read facing fascism :
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage
specifically https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage#toc3
Fascism is when I can input fake birth date into my init system
What a shocker, such an optional date field indeed seems like a grave menace to all of the freedoms. You should make a merge request with an optional field for an user's income, so that we may hunt the billionares and exterminate that vvermin with such powerful optional fields.
Why would they?