Which law though?

Which country/state/region? Does it even apply? We're talking about an open source project that is not being sold, with contributors from all over the world.

The laws which any contributors to the OSS project are subject to. Some projects geographically restrict who can contribute to avoid issues like this, but when laws are passed by a jurisdiction in which existing maintainers reside those maintainers have the choice to either comply or move to a different jurisdiction. Moving is extremely disruptive & expensive, so they often comply.

IIRC laws in some US states will require OS's to collect the age of the user so services can age restrict, it does not mandate any kind of ID verification.

It doesn't matter it's an open source project, ultimately it ends up in commercial products which do require following the rules.

The commercial products can patch it then if they so wish.

The field does nothing when left untouched, which it is by default.

If having the ability to set a piece of metadata worries you, don't set it.

One field doesn't worry me. IBM being in charge of a core linux component does.

The expressed intention behind adding the DoB field is to comply with age verification laws. Intent matters a whole lot here.

> comply with age verification laws

Do you want the developers to ignore the law and in the case of companies like Red Hat etc be vulnerable to law suits?

There's multiple laws, and they all conflict with each other.

They are obeying some by violating some others. In this case I'd personally do nothing.

Yes. Stand up and be a test case like Bernstein. Show some guts.

In the case of a company there’s even less at risk, and a lot of good will to be farmed.

These are laws passed by democratically elected legislatures. It’s not a legal issue, it’s a political one. Ostensibly, the will of the people. But these wimpy geeks passively-aggressively protest by arguing about code online, instead of engaging in real political activism.

When lobbyists push legislators to enact laws that violate the Constitution, and voting differently does not resolve the problem, the next recourse is the jury box. Courts are a check on the other two branches.

You can't foist this on an ethereal other that we can just blame for all our ills. Pretending American democracy is somehow broken to the point voting doesn't work is an insane take. Especially because you literally watched republican grassroots vote in their man and he's giving them what he campaigned on to give them.

Pretending there's nothing to done is just an excuse to do nothing

I was just as unhappy with Biden, with Obama (by the end of his term), and with Bush. So no, voting doesn’t work.

Regardless of the face you put on the presidency, we are always going to have to fight for privacy and freedom at the grassroots level.

Fortunately, economic decline has brought with it a decline in state capacity, which does bring new problems, but enforcement is becoming an issue across the board. That’s a form of freedom, even if it sucks to deal with stuff like petty crime on a daily basis.

Are you offering to pay for their lawyers?

If it’s a good test case, EFF would surely represent an individual pro bono. Depending on the importance of a corporate case, they would contribute heavily. But you can think of the expense as marketing, especially for a company like Red Hat who gets a lot of unnecessary grief from the community.

I don't think there's anything SystemD has to do in order to comply with age verification laws. They could just ignore it. They're not an operating system.

If any distro made their own way to store a DoB field, it'd be a nightmare of interoperability.