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Ugh. Alright. Yeah:

docs.kernel.org/process/coding…

But we're not strictly out of the woods yet:

"Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."

from freebsd.org/status/report-2025…

@llorenzin hahahaha I was on the “operating systems” team at my work when we did the fleet upgrade from centos 5 to 6. Getting several million servers moved from artisanal bash script to systemd was a lot of fun and everyone was so pissed about having to upgrade 😅😅😅

But we were starting to mandate cgroup hierarchies so away we went.

@hurt138 I’m not looking for a fight here, but many people find voluntary compliance with authoritarianism distasteful, and feel that aspects like this should be resisted as much as possible. Sometimes resistance looks like marching in the street, and sometimes it looks like a fistful of sand in the gears, starting with “there is no standard place to store that data, you’ll have to think of something else.”

There’s some additional complexity around the speed at which systemd rapidly replaced large parts of unix with an obviously terrible design, and because there is no easy outlet for that resentment, it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.

Finally, the compliance-in-advance is intended to improve the “saleability” of linux by large corporations to other large corporations, but many contributors do not value the concept of “saleability” and are concerned that the platform’s direction is increasingly set by companies that do not share their social goals.

@jmaris there aren't mastodon.social/@hurt138/11653…

hurt138

2026-05-06 22:58:37

I maybe don't fully understand the issue.. but are they not just adding an extra field for birthday to a file that already has your name, location, and email address? Most people leave all that blank anyhow.. they just want a standard place for it should you want to use it.. systemd is not making anyone use it or ask for it.

@zyx @jmaris

github.com/systemd/systemd/blo…

@jmaris @zyx

Sure, it's just a low level mechanism for enforcing undemocratic policies at the core of the world's most important free operating system, but you're free to dismiss it all as "hysteria".

Weird choice from somebody whose bio says "policy analyst for the OSI" though.

@pid_eins (@rmi)

First point: This is not mainly about age check. See here: „it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.“ cloudisland.nz/@rmi/1165304338…

Second point: Systemd aims to unify the distributions to some extend social.tchncs.de/@hierkiosk/11… so it is understandable that „greyhairs“ which are used to a number of different designs don't want to cope with it. Live and let live, I would say to both sides?

Btw. #greyhair is a nice word, a gender neutral term for #greybeard.

Rob Isaac

2026-05-07 00:21:49

@hurt138 I’m not looking for a fight here, but many people find voluntary compliance with authoritarianism distasteful, and feel that aspects like this should be resisted as much as possible. Sometimes resistance looks like marching in the street, and sometimes it looks like a fistful of sand in the gears, starting with “there is no standard place to store that data, you’ll have to think of something else.”

There’s some additional complexity around the speed at which systemd rapidly replaced large parts of unix with an obviously terrible design, and because there is no easy outlet for that resentment, it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.

Finally, the compliance-in-advance is intended to improve the “saleability” of linux by large corporations to other large corporations, but many contributors do not value the concept of “saleability” and are concerned that the platform’s direction is increasingly set by companies that do not share their social goals.

@pid_eins Man, that is nonsense.

"Why would there be an age check in systemd", but the only reason for an OS-level age field to exist is so somebody other than the machine's operator can tell that operator "no".

That's user-facing, just like that "$HOME is a temp file" debacle was user-facing. And it's not conspiracy thinking to look at these decisions and dozens of others and conclude that Systemd's most important constituency isn't people who own computers, it's people who rent them.

@pid_eins Right? And there is no struct tm birth_date; field in systemd at github.com/systemd/systemd/blo… either. Why would there be? systemd is an infrastructure thing, not a user-facing thing.

Nor is there a BIRTH_DATE_IS_SET macro for checking that field in systemd at github.com/systemd/systemd/blo…. After all, systemd is not user-facing software and would have no use for birthday-related code.