Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws
in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...
Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…
Homosexual activity is illegal in Uganda. If they pass a law saying your OS should track that, is it moral for developers to enable compliance with it? Or do developers have a moral duty to at least not go out of their way to enable that bullshit, even if they risk a gajillion dollar fine?
Homosexual activity is illegal in Uganda. If they pass a law saying your OS should track that, is it moral for developers to enable compliance with it? Or do developers have a moral duty to at least not go out of their way to enable that bullshit, even if they risk a gajillion dollar fine?
I have so many qualms with this comment alone. Concurrently, I am not sure how to articulate them. This text might be a bit messy as a result.
To begin, of course it wouldn’t be moral. Purposely complying with discriminatory laws is not at all a good thing. I don’t think systemd will even bother adding such a thing, even if it was against the law in Uganda. The difference between a country like Brazil asking for the date of birth for a user and Uganda asking for the user’s sexuality is:
The latter has not happened, and probably will not happen; Uganda has much better ways of finding out if someone is gay without the OS needing to say that.
Uganda’s law is much less important than laws in 2 (potentially 3) different states in the US, Germany1 and Brazil.
While it could be said that age-gating material is discriminatory, Uganda’s hypothetical law is much more likely to risk lives. systemd would not want blood on their hands.
I imagine you put thought into your hypothetical to see where it stands, but I would advise putting more thought into it. Stuff like this will drain both our energy.
Homosexual activity is illegal in Uganda. If they pass a law saying your OS should track that, is it moral for developers to enable compliance with it? Or do developers have a moral duty to at least not go out of their way to enable that bullshit, even if they risk a gajillion dollar fine?
I have so many qualms with this comment alone. Concurrently, I am not sure how to articulate them. This text might be a bit messy as a result.
To begin, of course it wouldn’t be moral. Purposely complying with discriminatory laws is not at all a good thing. I don’t think systemd will even bother adding such a thing, even if it was against the law in Uganda. The difference between a country like Brazil asking for the date of birth for a user and Uganda asking for the user’s sexuality is:
I imagine you put thought into your hypothetical to see where it stands, but I would advise putting more thought into it. Stuff like this will drain both our energy.