What silence?
If you think there’s silence, you just haven’t been looking in the right place.
In short:
- We will not force age verification on people
- That does not automatically mean having to patch out features related to it that can be used for both good and evil (having an optional birthdate entry in a user database, which is what systemd has done, is not necessarily bad, it can also be used to remind people of a birthday, or to enable/disable some parental controls). As long as it’s just an optional database entry, this is 100% noise 0% signal
- We haven’t fully decided what to do with countries and states that require age verification, but the primary lines of thoughts are either (1) “ignore it” (along with some reasons why the laws don’t actually affect us) or (2) “Provide a special “1984 edition” that does the minimum required and leave it up to people whether they download the normal or the 1984 edition”.