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The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
(www.sambent.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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what do you want him to do? to break the law?
There's no need to follow an unjust law, nor a law that makes you an unethical person.
"Software not for distribution or use in California" (aka: "offer void in Nebraska") is a perfectly valid compliance, btw.
There's also going the Ageless route and making protestware.
Yeah they seem to be absolutely fun.
And if you comply with unjust laws, then it's way harder to challenge them in the courts.
You can't put license conditions on LGPL code. Surprised you got 49 upvotes with nobody explaining that.
Are you sure? LGPL and other *PL licenses do already include terms where the rights and privileges granted by the license are limited by local applicable law, and this would be simply a case of denoting one of a number of local laws that apply.
I want him to do nothing.
He doesn't work for a distribution or a system integrator. He isn't the maintainer for systemd either. He's a random contributor, and he works for a cloud company that doesn't make or sell the sort of devices these laws apply to.
These age verification laws did not require Dylan Taylor to take any actions. He did that all on his own.
Who is going to arrest/fine FOSS developers for not doing anything about that? Would Brazil and US states go after uuuh, the systemd developers? What about distros not using systemd, like Slackware. Who is ultimately responsible for a collaborative project? Are they gonna send the police after Torvalds?
Plus, other countries don't have this obligation.
All that dev had to do is nothing. Instead he chose to comply with something that was never asked.
And how exactly would that be breaking the law?
Systemd isn't an operating system provider and has no legal obligation to make any change.
lol, what? You mean the law in a handful of states and Brazil? Why should the entire world be affected by this?
The beauty of FOSS is that if people want, they can just fork it and keep what they don't like out
Some laws need to be broken.
Have you learned nothing from history?