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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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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Developers are not a protected class. They do not get special social protections when they do ignorant things.
Any criticism should be directed primarily at the laws, not the person who suggested adding a birthdate field to the user.json.
Open source is dependent on volunteers contributing their time. The developers at SystemD have been receiving death threats over this. This article includes his name, face, workplace. I know that information is publicly available but the Geoguessr experts aren't the people we need to worry about.
He did not just suggest it. He went on and implemented it. All while the community was telling him "we don't want this", "stop with this" – look at the comments on GitHub. Yet he neglected all this feedback.
As an open-source volunteer, you work for the community, right? If you go ahead while the community is telling you "we don't want this", then whom are you working for?
Of course there are no obligations and he's'free to do as he pleases. Likewise, the community or I are under no obligations of not criticizing him for what he chose to do.
So maybe next time when someone sees a pull-request like this, they think before merging it?
*provided no one gets hurt. I sympathise with the uproar, but physically hurting the guy is definitely too much
Stop trying to make what he did ok. It is not ok.
The key phrase is Personal Attack.
If the law was the only thing stopping you doing that, it reflects on you.