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Inside the Systemd Age Verification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism (itsfoss.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

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[–] 17 points 7 months ago (1 child)

What do you mean, he “admitted” that?

It’s quite literally the first thing he wrote in his pull request to systemd:

Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

And the second paragraph of his pull request to arch:

Recent age verification laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. require platforms to verify user age. Collecting birth date at install time ensures Arch Linux is compliant with these regulations.

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