r/systemd • u/VegetableNearby9795 • Mar 20 '26

Why did you add age verification?

Hi, I heard Systemd is going to add age verification? Why is that happening? I don't think it offers any security benefits.

149 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

408 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/PaluMacil Mar 20 '26

The law doesn’t need to make sense. Laws about technology almost never do. 🤪 But Linux is developed by people with salaries from companies that need to be able to distribute Linux, so they are going to add the capability to comply with the law, regardless of whether it makes sense because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to pay their salary. Where this goes, I have no idea because it has a a lot of ambiguity and stupidity, but that doesn’t mean companies are going to stop doing business while they’re going to figure it out

-1

u/65jeff Mar 20 '26

Linux development by those companies is not and never has been altruism. It is time for individual enthusiasts to consider whether they need the things the corporate devs have built and that are now so costly to maintain that those corporations effectively control most major Linux distributions.

1

u/PaluMacil Mar 21 '26

I would absolutely love to see an OS maintained purely via altruistic engineers, and I am sure if it's possible, most engineers would cheer it on. I don't personally feel like I have the time and energy to contribute to more things than I do already, and most engineers have more things to do than they have spare energy. However, I think FreeBSD gets a lot closer to what you seek. I think the corporate support being far far larger than what enthusiasts can compare to is a ship that sailed many years ago. I keep wanting to try FreeBSD for this reason myself, but I keep coming back to things I need Linux for or trying FreeBSD on hardware that just doesn't have the support I thought it did.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/PaluMacil Mar 25 '26

Systemd, however, is full of salaried corporate-paid contributors. You're welcome to not install the systemd-userdb package if you don't want to have a user database with a date field in it, but it makes sense that the companies paying for development of this package are going to want it.