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Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field

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Why This Matters

The emergence of the Liberated systemd fork highlights ongoing concerns over user privacy and data collection in widely-used Linux components. By removing the new birth date field, this fork aims to prevent potential surveillance features, reflecting a broader push for privacy-focused modifications in open-source projects. This development underscores the importance of transparency and user control in system-level software for both developers and consumers.

Key Takeaways

The blog Linuxiac reports: A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd's recently added support for storing a user's birth date in JSON user records.

The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field.

Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd, or a general-purpose alternative to the upstream project. Its stated purpose is to remain close to upstream systemd while removing what the author describes as "surveillance enablement"... The author recommends testing the fork in a virtual machine before using it on real hardware and warns nightly builds are more likely to be unstable than named releases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.