>The community pushed back hard on this one. The Arch maintainers are holding, Canonical backed away, and Artix Linux, the systemd-free Arch derivative, issued the clearest statement: they will never require any verification or ID. When someone opened a revert PR, Lennart closed it himself on March 19th. The birthDate field is in systemd and it's staying. You can read the whole article here: sambent\[dot\]com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/ I had to leave the l
In March 2024, something unusual happened in one of the most fundamental pieces of Linux infrastructure. A developer using the name Dylan submitted pull requests to systemd, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux that added age verification fields to core system code. What made this noteworthy wasn't the technical implementation—it was what happened next, and what it revealed about how decisions get made in open-source software.
The official story from maintainers was straightforward: this was a misguided experiment that the community rejected, so it got reverted. Case closed. Two Microslop employees merged the changes, some community members complained, and the whole thing was treated as a minor blip in the development cycle. The narrative presented to users was one of a healthy ecosystem catching and correcting mistakes quickly.
But that's not what the available evidence shows. According to posts on r/privacy and technical discussions that followed, Dylan's own pull request descriptions characterized the age verification addition as "hilariously pointless." Despite this self-aware dismissal of the feature's utility, the code was merged anyway. When someone later opened a revert request to remove the birthDate field from systemd, Lennart Poettering, systemd's primary maintainer, personally closed it on March 19th without merging the revert.
That single action—blocking the revert rather than allowing the code to be removed—contradicted the public position that this was simply an unwanted experimental feature. If the consensus truly rejected it, why prevent its removal? The birthDate field remains in systemd to this day.
The community response was swift but fractured. Arch Linux's maintainers held firm, neither adopting the verification requirement nor removing the code. Canonical, under pressure, backed away from implementing this in Ubuntu's version. Artix Linux, the systemd-free derivative built specifically to offer alternatives to Poettering's direction, issued the clearest statement: they would never require verification or any form of identification checking.
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This creates an uncomfortable position for the broader Linux ecosystem. The code exists in one of the most widely deployed pieces of system software. It's not active or enforced in most distributions, but it's there. Whether Dylan was a genuine believer in the feature, a useful idiot following instructions, or something else entirely, the technical reality remains: the infrastructure for age verification made it into the core.
The significance lies not in whether age verification will be forced on users tomorrow, but in what this episode reveals about governance and transparency in open-source projects. When maintainers of critical infrastructure can accept code they describe as pointless, watch it get merged anyway, and then block its removal, something is wrong with the decision-making process. The community caught this instance, but how many others slip through with less visibility?
Public trust in open-source software depends on the ability to verify that decisions are made openly and according to stated principles. When the official narrative diverges from the available actions and code commits, that trust erodes. Whether intentional or not, this episode demonstrated how a feature can become entrenched in critical infrastructure even when the community and maintainers claim to reject it.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.1% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~150Network
Secret kept
2.4 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
