Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.
The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.
But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.
At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.
This guy fucking sucks.
I hope he gets blacklisted from working with other projects.
Not surprising, this guy is also onboard with Google locking down Android: https://dylanmtaylor.com/posts/2026-03-19-googles-new-android-sideloading-flow-is-a-fair-trade
Y’all are going after this guy rn but in a few months we should expect more and more distros to do changes like this. So lets think, what is the real issue going on here? The real issue is that these distros are hosted on GitHub, which is a Microsoft company, and they will comply in a heartbeat and take that shit down if the software is against the law. So the two options are to move off Github or wait until it gets taken down, and lawyer up and fight California and Colorado, which if so, we’d better start a fund as a community for some lawyers for these devs.
I was expecting civil discourse and a level-headed response.
He may have been hoping for that, but surely he didn’t truely expect it. The FOSS community can barely have a civil discussion about filesystems.
At the moment of most intense debates about mandatory age checks and government surveillance you (Dylan) hoped people to be calm about this? Then you my friend are simply delusional. They are angry and for a good reason. Why the rush to comply with a surveillance practice that hasn’t forced on you with some sanction or enforcement. You did not even wait for it to play out. You did not have a discourse about alternatives. You just went ahead and hastily applied a change as if as if doing some sort of coup.
That’s a rather negative view. There’s a big difference between people who actually contribute to FOSS (in any way, not just code) and random keyboard warriors in the contents. Sure, there’s always some drama somewhere, but that’s not exclusive to FOSS.
There’s also a massive difference when one proactively participates in destroying linux users’ freedom, one of the pillars of foss
HEY MY GUY you want a CIVIL discussion about CIVIL DISCUSSION?
/s
Ugh, I’m forking this thread. If you guys can’t agree with me I’ll make my own.
Oh wow, this guy ^ is the best at civil discussion!
Why’d you reply to yourself 😭😭
It’s my thread I can do what I want
we’re what happens when dumpster fighting punks need their laptops to work
He barely went into developing systemd for two weeks before shoehorning in his bootlicking, he can fuck off. You’re supposed to stick it to the man, not stick up for him
Fuck him. As another user put it best: https://piefed.social/comment/10665234
One interesting thought I’ve had is actually that if we strip this signal to websites/apps and do not report an age range at all, but the vast majority of users DO, that actually gives us a more unique and trackable browser fingerprint.
As someone who is not a fan of adding the age field I’m curious what people think of this.
Being on Linux and in control of your OS couldn’t you just set the age statically to something like 99? I really do not understand the hate :/
I really do not understand the hate :/
The itsfoss interviewer goes into this:
A lot of backlash isn’t about the code change, but about what it represents.
You say this is “just attestation, not verification” but we know that infrastructure always gets repurposed later. This is where the legit fear lies.
Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have “compliant Linux” and “Freedom-first Linux”?
Sam Bent’s article also goes into this (although, fuck that clickbait title): https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/
He read the laws, decided compliance was the correct response, and went to work. Every objection the community raised went nowhere: that this enables surveillance infrastructure, that lying is trivially easy, that the laws themselves are unconstitutional overreach. He’d already accepted the law as legitimate and moved to implementation.
He read the law, took it at face value, and started writing code. The word for what that is sits somewhere past malice, something more insidious: an engineer who treats compliance as engineering, who sees a legal requirement the way he sees a technical specification, and will implement whatever the spec says regardless of who wrote the spec or why.
The reason to name him is the pattern. The surveillance state runs on volunteers: people who do the implementation work for free, out of genuine conviction, with no paper trail connecting them to the money that wrote the laws.
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I can’t help but feel bad for Dylan. It’s not like if he hadn’t done this someone else wouldn’t have had to eventually.
He brought this on himself.
Why not wait until it becomes absolutely necessary and all other alternatives are exhausted? The mandatory age check thing hasn’t been even accepted whole US wide let alone world-wide. He did not even wait for ut to play out. What is with the enthusiasm to jump on board with this?
Why not let someone else do it then? Why eagerly sign up to be the one to do it?
Because he’s a slimy piece of shit.
Blessings to you young bootlicker. May you pay escalating subscriptions and own nothing eternally, forevermore, amen.
