Someone Forked systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support
AnonTechie writes:
The project removes the birthDate field systemd added last week in response to age verification laws.
The project's latest move has not helped its reputation among the skeptics. Last week, developers merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user records, tied to age verification laws in California, Colorado, and Brazil.
Earlier, we covered what that actually means, but to recap, the field is optional, can only be set by an administrator, and systemd itself does nothing with the data. It is simply a standardized field in the user record file that other projects like xdg-desktop-portal can build age verification compliance on top of-distros that do not need it can ignore it entirely.
But "optional" has not been enough to stop people from treating it as a line being crossed, and now a solo developer has responded the way the open source community usually reacts: by forking.
[...] Compared to mainline systemd, the fork changes 12 files across 5 commits, all focused on scrubbing out everything related to the birthDate addition. That means not just the field itself but also the option to set a birth date via homectl, the relevant man page entries, display code, and tests.
Though, as of writing this, it was 37 commits behind from systemd, so that is something to keep in mind if you are hoping to implement this on a general-use or production system.
Jeffrey also maintains a companion repository, systemd-suite, which is meant for testing the fork. So, while this is very much a one-person project, there seems to be at least some technical groundwork behind it beyond the birthDate revert.
[Source]: IT'S FOSS
Previously: Age Checks Creep Into Linux, systemd Locks It in, Developer Defends Himself
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.