Some of you need to watch this video, and hang your head in shame.
Dylan Taylor has been receiving constant harassment, including threats to his life and safety, for actions done collectively by SystemD. The article by Sam Bent was explictly mentioned as part of the harassment campaign, and rightfully so.
I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.
If you ever wished ill upon another human being for complying with a relatively inconsequential law, you are better off never touching a computer again. The Linux community has collectively gone so far beyond what is acceptable here.
That isn’t the next logical step for systemd, which is what this post is about.
The reason systemd stores this information is that systemd stores user information and this is user information.
If some future application comes along that wants to require age verification and use that field to store the data, then you can simply choose to not install it. Problem solved.
Removing birthDate doesn’t stop these programs from existing. If there isn’t a birthDate field then they can simply decide that they’re going to store the birthdate in the user’s ‘location’ field instead and it would work perfectly fine. Are you going to remove the location field too? All of the text fields?
Adding a specific birthDate field is simply recognizing that this software exists (which, it does) and that systemd is the logical place to store user metadata (which it is).
If you don’t like the software that will do age verification then don’t install that software.