this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to "comply in advance" with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that's not okay!
I studied at the PR in question and that's not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I'd absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user's active permission.
Basically it's a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user's hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.
Mind you, I feel there's also value in loud non-compliance and I'm glad some are taking that road -- keep it up, folks. But I'm leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.
That's something I wondered about the person who implemented this too, I wonder if it was an attempt to install a bare minimum to say "There. We did it. Leave us alone." Instead of leaving it up to the government to force the issue, and he's getting absolutely raked over the coals for it.
If that's the case, I feel terribly bad about this backfiring so hard on him. I do think we should be putting up a lot more resistance before resorting to something like this though.
Some others have also suggested that this was done out of spite, however after reading the github I didn’t see anything said to support that. Are you sure you’re not reading something into this that’s not there?
I'll be honest I haven't dug into the GitHub transcripts.
Absolutely not sure! In fact my first inclination leans towards the cynical "This is totally a pro-authoritarian virtue signal move." Because that's seemingly everything nowadays.
But also I know things are seldom as they first seem. So I'm at least curious about this guy's actual motives. Coming out of nowhere just for this contribution is hecka sus though.
I don't like any of it. I looked to the Internet and open source to escape that petulant normie-verse of endless rage and braindead legislation. And they're coming to assimilate us like they do everything else. :(
I’m fairly sure this is the first systemd pull request that many here have viewed. I wouldn’t say we’re coming out of nowhere.
Sorry I didn't articulate myself well here at all.
What I meant was, I've heard this particular contributor's history is slim to none, and suddenly he shows up and PR's this age form into the kernel.
That's what's weird.
You're exactly right, most of us probably haven't looked at kernel PRs. Such a major component in such a major project isn't really a "My first contribution" territory, right?
So it should raise some eyebrows when this guy just pops up and PRs it and it gets merged so quick.
I'm not the most brilliant at this stuff so I'm happily open to being educated here if I'm way off, though.
Yeah I see your point. I feel like it's entirely reasonable, though. Like those who went to the PR, they saw something in the news and decided to do something about it with their abilities, throwing aside whether that's good for a moment. I certainly would not call the optional JSON schema for user records a critical component especially as no existing fields were modified, just new ones.
(And FWIW it's systemd, very different from the kenrel, though I do feel like you know what you meant to talk about. systemd's code quality is relatively notorious anyways.)
I agree that not everything is what it seems at first, I just fear it’s wishful thinking in this case.
Yeah, I fear you're right. Evidence doesn't point to benevolence here.
I "love" how everyone now recommends alternative/non-systemd distros, not realizing that those will have to implement exactly the same sooner or later. Systemd is just moving fast.
You only have to implement it if you care about a stupid law. Fuck.The.Law.
Best lawyer ever
Just don't care about the stupid law!
If you are an international organized collective without monetary goals - who the fuck cares about local law? What is the worst that can happen - threaten to jail a person that is using $LINUX_DISTRIBUTION?
No, they threaten to jail the creator of $LINUX_DISTRIBUTION. I think the best stance is Arch's current stance of doing nothing and saying nothing.
And WHO does they want to jail? If its an operation that is distributed all over the world...
Then they'll just jail any individuals they can.
The fascist states of America already do so... so, why cooperate?
I don't want Linus to go to jail :(
us law doesnt existvputside the united states. systemd is not a corporation, its open source code.
But systemd exists inside the US. What do you want, an optional field to be optional for the US? Then good news, the fucking optional field is already optional.
Sometimes, I feel like Lemmy lives in this leftist utopia that doesn't really exist. It's really weird.
No they wont, because this is open source and fuck corporate tracking and identification.
You do realise there are many different jurisdictions om this planet, right? Some fight back more valiant against this shit than others.
Of course it's still up in the air where which law will be introduced, but assuming every single distro or project has to follow the same laws is naive.
On an individual level, absolutely do not comply in advance with fucked up laws.
But as a technical professional working in regulated industries, you have to try to predict future legislation to remain compliant and permit your place of work to continue operating. Anything computer or network related takes time to update, and if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down. It's far better to be proactive and ensure that your organization is compliant with future legislation than it is to sit on your hands because you don't like this new change and then have to scramble to implement it at the 11th hour before your organization becomes noncompliant and may be forced to pause operating business. That's literally your job if you are, say, a SystemD developer working for RedHat/IBM
This ire needs to be directed towards your local politicians (whether or not such age verification laws are in the process of being passed!), not towards career developers who happen to work on projects you care about
Or we could direct the ire at both. There's no shortage of ire here.
I'd agree with you, except that it's clear that the political systems we live under are flawed/non-functional. Non-compliance may be our next best shot at stopping these laws from getting any more traction.
It's clear to me with the stance that the dev that closed the revert pull request that they aren't willing to form any resistance to these types of changes. Actually, the revert pull request stated that their request was due to a number of people discussing the matter and they ultimately decided that there could be harm inflicted, yet the dev 'poettering' decided to supercede this decision. Not only is this the first crack in a hold-the-line situation with other major FOSS projects refusing to make the change but also shows their hand at how they stance themselves politically.
In theory, but also we just don't hear of this actually happening to organizations very much. Why? (I could be wrong, I don't constantly dig through news to find instances of this happening.)
Everything from tax issues to personal data retention and protection policy gets overlooked all the time, with very real consequences, and we don't hear of those organizations getting "taken down" for it. (Like when Equifax lost all our Pii and were just like 'whoops.' They're still forcibly embedded in our lives anyway.)
Maybe this would get used to bring down a tiny small business if it caught legal attention, but anything larger could likely shrug it off.
Organizations don't seem to bother with such inconveniences unless it's actively enforced and audited. Is California really going to do that with this? Seems like it'd be prohibitively expensive.
So it's just a little weird to me when legislation is proposed to infringe on end-users and suddenly there's this huge rush to "get compliant" ahead of time. It seems like a lot less IT due diligence and more virtue-signaling agreeance with totalitarian politics.
No, no change was made in fact. It was a pull request... that was rejected.
Guess if I propose to edit you comment to "I'm stupid" and you say "no" you have also made that change somehow...
The REVERT was rejected by the systemd maintainer. The PR was accepted.
It was not rejected, it was merged...
This is actually incorrect. If you check the birthdate Pull Request changelog and compare with the actual files, all of those changes are still in place. The decision to revert was rejected by 'poettering' here.
Lennart is a fascist fuck.