The latest changes implemented in the Systemd repo, related to or prompted by age-verification laws, have made many people unhappy (I suppose links about this aren’t necessary). This has led to a surge in Systemd forks during the last days (“surge” because there have always been plenty of forks). Here are some forks that explicitly mention those changes as their reason for forking (rough time ordering taken from the fork page):
-
paramazo/systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager without age verification”
-
ganitam/systemd “Systemd fork just before the Age Verification addition. Hoping more capable developers and maintainers do same…”
-
GSYT-Productions/systemd-fork “The systemd System and Service Manager, without the stupid Age Verification”
-
speedythesnail/unret arded-systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager, without the ret arded age-verification commits”
-
ta13579/systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager WITHOUT THE FUCKING AGE CHECKS”
-
r4shsec/systemd-no-age-verification “This is systemd but without the age verification made via pull request https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40978”
-
Pingasmaster/fightthesystemd “Systemd without the nonsense: no age verification, no lighthouse built-in.”
-
Jeffrey-Sardina/system “Liberated systemd – no surveillance. Ever.”
-
HaplessIdiot/systemd-saneagecheck “The systemd System and Service Manager with age verification bypass and polling rate options for said feature”
-
Queer-Coded-LGBTQ/systemd-fuck-california “The systemd System and Service Manager, but without age bs added in.”
-
Codiak540/unshitted-systemd “A fork of systemd aiming to strip the Age verification. Sue me california.”
Hopefully the energy of this reaction won’t be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.
Except that this change doesn’t lock us into age verification at all. On its own it’s harmless. There are still steps ahead before it’s actually difficult to evade. And sure, we are heading that way and it only makes sense to be prepared for the steps towards the next steps of age verification laws. It really isn’t magic to comply with these small steps, as long as they themselves don’t present a treat, be aware of the bigger picture and still do the work to prevent the actual OS-level age verification.