Per the very first reply on their thread discussing it in their forums, which I linked directly to for the post title:
We’ll NEVER require any verification or identification from the user.
However, what’s gonna happen should the attempts to age-gate the XDG portal screw over alt-init distros like Artix too? My guess is maybe they start blocking regions which force age gating like Arch Linux 32 is doing.
I totally get what you are saying, and I don’t think we are really in disagreement about anything here. This is just my personal point of contention.
Its opening a can of worms for xdg-desktop-portal and systemd for something that they don’t need to or shouldn’t need to act on. If they make this change then: If the Afghani govt issues a request for gender, they should include that in userDB as well then. If Colorado’s new law requires age data to be held differently or different format, they will need to include that as well then. COPPA already exists, so do they need to further change how they store this data? If a new federal law is passed for age verification, they will need to support that on top of the existing state laws. Should it be jurisdiction specific? EU laws might state you can’t arbitrarily store this data, so now you need to check operating geo. Which jurisdictions do you honor? Which do you ignore?
Its optional until made so convoluted that its required. I think what’s so interesting to me is how this all goes back to a 30+ year old debate on the UNIX philosophy.
Oh yeah, this is totally a can of worms that I don’t think we should be opening.
I just channel that into yelling at politicians, the FOSS devs are on our team they just have to make the best of a dumb situation.