> 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.
The Brazilian law does NOT require this. This is a misconception, and likely based on an understanding of California's law being extrapolated to the Brazilian law.
They are almost complete opposites.
The Brazilian law (Lei 15.211/2025) puts the burden of age verification on *providers* of web platforms, app stores, or dumb terminals. Not on operational systems.
It also mentions "reasonable measurements" - which vary according to the type of content, platform, etc - and which are much less strict that anything written in California's or UK's laws regarding the same subject. It is far more based on individual risk assessment and purpose of the platforms themselves.
In all fairness, the Brazilian law is the most friendly to open source and the status quo. Even though I'm also worried about the long term results of this legislation, I'm somewhat relieved by the way it turned out.
If California wants to create its own Protect the children operating system, it should bear the cost and responsibility for this alone, and not export any of the sketchy political agenda to the wider open source community.
It's the authors first time contributing to this repo and it the feedback on the PR that was addressed is really odd, like some of it is super basic stuff, even if you're not familiar with the code base or the language.
Just an all round weird vibe.
* LP had zero objections to merging this commit into systemd [1];
* Amutable CEO is confident they have a very robust path to revenue [2];
* It is Facebook that pushes age verification laws all around the world;
I sense that his new startup is exactly what we are afraid of: a way to prevent reverting of these patch and then actually enforce the upcoming mandatory KYC to use the computer.
[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4...
Dylan M. Taylor's GH profile claims that he's from Durham, NC (which does not have this law). He also references to a draft to xdg-desktop-portal which has not been accepted. (Add parental controls to the Accounts portal: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922)
I'm asking:
- What is this guy's personal interest in pushing this through? (It seems non-neccessary and is questionable at what the end goal)
- Who's political agenda is he sponsoring for this?
- Is he getting financially incentivized to do this?
And not only that, but he engages in communication with people in tickets and ignores all constructive criticism.
as per usual, liberal policy doing the exact opposite thing they claim it does.
This developer should be blacklisted from all open source projects, permanently.
I feel like complying really undermines any first amendment arguments. Software is a first amendment protected form of expression, giving in before getting any actual threats from the state makes your participation seem voluntary.
Systemd's participation puts the entire world into compliance with a California law
And now they are creeping into open source projects too. What once was thought as the bastion of absolute freedom from the state
But if this becomes a thing in Linux for the distro I use (doubtful), I will abandon Linux after 30+ years.
I am rather confident OpenBSD will ignore this law and I expect other BSDs will to. If not, back to DOS :)
Note, I have a BSD on a coupld of old laptops for testing reasons. I test what I write in the BSDs to help find issues, that works well.
They cannot loose markets, like California or Brazil.
Acquiescing to (however veiled and excused) authoritarian overreach is not the way forward. The correct attitude towards this "Think of the Children but Really Think of the Advertisers' Profits" initiative is to let California (and other proponents) to figure out how they can do business without Linux or any other software that depends on it.
OSS is a bastion of freedom -- real freedom, freedom FROM, not American Freedom (freedom to abuse and exploit others). We must defend it. DO NOT COMPLY.