this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Jesus fucking Christ guys. Regardless of your thoughts on age verification, hunting down someone just for complying with the (currently) rather inoffensive law is nuts.
Posting his face here is absolutely going to get him doxxed, and going to cause someone to actually hunt him down and hurt him.
Focus your anger on the people who actually passed and push for this law. Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.
EDIT: Yeah, this whole discussion is toxic now. Suggesting that someone shouldn't be lynched for making a change in a piece of software is equivalent to me agreeing with that change. I don't like the push for age verification. It gives me a lot of stress. But I don't think some random software developer should be hurt for it.
Reading the room wrong when writing software is not worth a life.
Why does the rest of the world have to comply with a handful of states laws? The US is not the center of the universe. If you people want to lick the boot and allow this, then by all means, create your own terrible versions and leave the rest of the world alone.
Have you checked your local laws? At least for Germany there is already one requiring this option.
Systemd is NOT an operating system provider, so they didn't have to do absolutely anything.
It was their choice to do what they did, not the law, especially since it won't be active and enforceable before next year.
Witch hunts are despicable indeed but lets not use that an an excuse to justify what they did.
It's not inoffensive at all, it's being pushed by religious whackjobs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-age-gating-isnt-about-kids-its-about-control
That's the Minnesota bill. The PR does not comply with that. You can read on how to the California law and NY and Colorado bills basically say to give the user a drop-down to select their birth date.
That's the whole point, though, they don't have to implement it. They're under no obligation at all to do so. Try to rule Linux is illegal in California and watch Silicon Valley lobbyists damn near riot. They're just giving in, but even just procrastination would be a ridiculously effective tactic.
So he already had a warning that the majority of the community didn't agree on what he was doing. Nobody asked him to. He chose to continue – he could have imagined the consequences.
And the whole context on why and why now he did this is fishy.
He "was only following orders". But yes this is a class war.
Complying with this shit is nuts.
Provided compliance is nuts, this man is a nutcase for complying. Sounds all good, but I dont believe being a nutcase warrants doxxing, verbal harassment, verbal threatening, and everything else that we're seeing here.
Hey, honestly, thanks for being mature and real about this. I 100% am going to be migrating away from systemd after seeing how quickly this happened at the project and yhat Microsoft can basically decide they want code added to it; but I'm not gonna drag this random junior dev... I'm gonna choose to direct my hate at Microsoft instead. If they orchestrated these changes, that is the story here. When did that corporation get its fingers into the cookie jar, and how do I now make sure my entire software stack is free from projects where Microsoft can have this level of influence? That's the tactical picture that matters.
So what you are saying is is that you are a collaborator, too? What’s your real name, friend?
it's the public info on the accounts GitHub page it's not like anybody really had to dig at all
There's a huge difference between someone's information being available on github and someone taking their picture and photoshopping it to look like a mugshot and writing a hit piece article that's whipping people up into a lynch mob.
Not really.
Uhm, wat. Had to implement, worldwide? Da fuck are you talking about?
Nah useful idiots like this deserve the shit they'll get.
No.