Einfallstor

Der Stabilitätswettbewerb zwischen der Linux- und der BSD-Fangemeinde hat einen eher sportlichen Charakter, aber spätestens bei systemd ist Schluss mit lustig:

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, Linux plus systemd, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Linux/systemd.

Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning systemd system made useful by the systemd corelibs, systemd daemons, and vital systemd components comprising a full OS as defined by Poettering.

Das Linux-MCP mit den beeindruckenden Sicherheitslücken wurde maßgeblich von Lennart Poettering entwickelt, der zwischenzeitlich bei Microsoft arbeitete und sich mittlerweile hauptberuflich um die Integrität von Linux-Systemen kümmert.

Poettering gibt sich jedenfalls alle Mühe, die Vorbehalte gegen seine Arbeit zu verstärken, indem er Grundlagen für eine Altersverifikation in systemd protegiert –

In March of 2026, systemd, the init system that boots most modern Linux distributions, merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user database. The stated purpose was compliance with California's AB-1043, Colorado's SB26-051, and Brazil's Lei 15.211/2025, a wave of age verification laws requiring operating systems to collect birth dates from users at account setup, then feed that data to app stores via a real-time API. The PR was submitted by a contributor using the GitHub handle dylanmtaylor. Within days it had 945 comments and was locked by maintainers. Someone opened a revert PR. Lennart Poettering closed it without merging on March 19th, saying the field is optional and systemd enforces zero policy. The birthDate field is still in systemd. systemd PR #40954 revert PR #41179

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

– was natürlich zu einem spontanen Fork und Überstunden für Kassandra führt.