What’s his motivation? Money? Fame?

Why does anybody submit changes to any project? Probably a wide variety of reasons.

I’ve been a programmer for 20 years and I’d never jump on a chance to add something that aligns with laws I think are unethical dog shit—especially in the Linux space where the whole goal is to not be Windows

I hope that you can see that there are people who see this addition as being not a big deal: optional field, no verification, GECOS fields already storing ‘realName’, ‘location’, etc.

It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to understand why a person would submit a simple update when they don’t think it’s of world changing significance.

I’m a bit frustrated with the casual “what’s the big deal?” mindset that a lot of people I’ve encountered have about this.

I’m one of those people so maybe I can help.

Are we not living through the same timeline where the US has fallen under the control of a fascist regime that is being eagerly assisted by Meta, Apple, Microsoft and a ton of other massive corporations?

Yes, we are. That’s why I don’t use their software or services. The major, and most important, reason why this isn’t a big deal to me is that Apple, Meta and Microsoft don’t choose the software that is part of my system. We’re not in commercial software land, this is the FOSS world. Here, I get to choose what happens on my system because I am the one in completely control.

If a project decides that I have to submit to age verification then I simply won’t use their project, it’s just that simple. But, that is not what is happening here. There is no verification of any sort, nor is the operation of systemd affected by this field in ANY way.

I don’t buy the slippery slope argument that’s being presented around this topic which makes the change seem like the beginning of fascisim or the end of privacy or whatever other hyperbolic situations that people are breathlessly inventing to justify their outrage.

We already have fields to store personal data and those fields are optional and rarely used. They exist because they are needed in some cases and in the cases where they are not needed they do not do anything. The birthDate field is exactly the same as the realName field in that sense. It only does something if you choose to install software that uses it.

This field will NEVER affect you unless you choose to install software on your system that requires it.

What’s happening here is that people are treating this single JSON field as a stand-in for age verification. It is not. If someone wants to meaningfully fight age verification laws then they need to involve themselves in politics instead of social media brigading and harassment campaigns against developers.

In my view, this ‘situation’ exists because it allows hoards of people to appear to be ‘doing something’ without actually doing anything. It’s low effort activisim. People find it much easier to write self-righteous and hyperbolic comments and to get into internet fights than to do the hard work required to affect the politicians and laws that are passed.

On top of this we have the signal boosting effect of trend following, clickbait-driven sites and content creators looking to boost ad revenue by playing up outrage and drama.

I disagree with these laws, but this is not the hill where the battle is being fought. It is a pointless distraction and one that is being used to actively target a person for harm.

Nothing is going to happen on your system unless you choose to let it happen. No software update by any project will ever change this.

The only thing that will change it, and the thing that people should focus on, are the laws in the places where they live.