And in a month none will be active at all.

They’ll just keep forkin’ and removing that field haha

Honestly it's such a minor change, I'm pretty sure they could just grab all the upstream commits in the future and not do anything and it'll be fine.

More like forks and patches

My line in the sand is when a distro/app starts enforcing entry of birth date data. Having a database field to store it, or even an optional prompt for it isn't the point where I bin it.

You know I remember when age verification was a thing on porn sites.

No big deal, I was like 12 and could easily say "yupp, I was born April 20th, 1969" and there was no problem.

Now, in several states that has escalated to you showing your ID.

Do you think this is the end game? Systemd made it clear with this move that any kind of US law passed will be able to be honored by their architecture. They didn't take a stand that you would expect from pretty much the entire Linux community as a whole.

And see the funny part is where you talk about "if the government wants age verification they have to do it themselves" they pretty much do in USA its called your social security number. Banks, auto dealerships, landlords etc use it all the time and its very effective.

By not taking a strong stance against what is happening here you are paving the road brick by brick to having to provide full on SSN and very plausibly retina scans or something similar in the not so distant future before you can even login to your computer or phone.

I don't understand, how people here are missing that. Fuck we are on Lemmy because we see how shit worked with things like reddit and others. Things always escalate when control and greed are the primary motivators.

This will escalate. And when it does I want you to remember that people were rightfully making a HUGE FUCKING DEAL about when systemd started doing this because by then you will be able to see clearly how it led to whatever surveillance wet dream they are absolutely going to force on us. It will be clear, and this will be step 1 .

I agree with all that you've said. But why add it now? Why haven't they added it a long time ago? Or if now they remembered, why not other extra optional fields that some people might want, like gender, sex, any other field? Oh, it would be too political? I see...

Yup. All this crying about the field is a big nothing burger.

Nah. What is funny is a pull-request explicitly stating compliance with age verification laws getting merged and then revert refused with a "don't bring this discussion here" argument. This is where Lennart has lost me, with that bullshit of an excuse

Give an inch they'll take a mile.I see your instance is UK, so I assume you don't understand how utterly insane US lawmakers are right now.

But my clickbait!

well, obviously. that happens on some external service.

Not yet, it doesn't. We'll see how far we go down this hole.

Yes, but what's wrong with this? If you gather engineers that are capable to maintain it - what is the downside? Systemd could always have used a bit of competition, I think most of us can agree. Most of the forks of systemd will fail, but most of all projects fail after some time. I don't think this situation will harm systemd ultimately and it shouldn't.

Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;

What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I've been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn't really care. Now that I've read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don't have a good feeling for the future of systemd.

Yupp 100% optional.

for now

Well not really, they added a field so that they could store date of birth in the way they have a field to store "real name".

So you can be sure my birthday is 4/20/1969 as sure as you can be that my name is Bimbo Baggins.

Note that for the California law at least, this is "good enough" and the OS never actually has to validate anything. In practice a person without admin access could have their birthdate out of control, well, until they run a patched browser that skips asking systemd and just always sends a desired bracket...

It kind of works to keep kids under 13 sending the signal with parental administration, but doesn't do anything for more resourceful people you tend to find over 13.

Consider yourself lucky if you haven't been there in the times before systemd. It streamlined a lot of things under the hood that were stupidly varied among distros, like where certain configurations were placed. Really, nobody needed that and it broke a lot. Systems also introduced some sanity through service dependency awareness, e.g., which service needs to be running before the next can be started. You might find that obvious, but Linux was still stuck in the 80s on that level and essentially a guessing game.

That said, if you want to try something else, the most reasonable but quite involved alternative is probably guix with shepherd.

MX Linux. But it's as pointless as only driving cars without onboard computer not to get tracked.

I think what they mean is, with a black box we know the input, documents, and output, yes you can buy beer, but we don't know the internals. How and for how long is the data stored, who is it shared with, who has access to it, how much meta data can they pull together to build a profile on you and so on.