Moral duty begins with contribution of any sort imo. But I still agree, this is a law that can and should be ignored. Don’t think this pr is put from any actual pressure though yet, more akin to “soft compliance”

Homosexual activity is illegal in Uganda. If they pass a law saying your OS should track that, is it moral for developers to enable compliance with it? Or do developers have a moral duty to at least not go out of their way to enable that bullshit, even if they risk a gajillion dollar fine?

I have so many qualms with this comment alone. Concurrently, I am not sure how to articulate them. This text might be a bit messy as a result.

To begin, of course it wouldn’t be moral. Purposely complying with discriminatory laws is not at all a good thing. I don’t think systemd will even bother adding such a thing, even if it was against the law in Uganda. The difference between a country like Brazil asking for the date of birth for a user and Uganda asking for the user’s sexuality is:

1. The latter has not happened, and probably will not happen; Uganda has much better ways of finding out if someone is gay without the OS needing to say that.
2. Uganda’s law is much less important than laws in 2 (potentially 3) different states in the US, Germany1 and Brazil.
3. While it could be said that age-gating material is discriminatory, Uganda’s hypothetical law is much more likely to risk lives. systemd would not want blood on their hands.

I imagine you put thought into your hypothetical to see where it stands, but I would advise putting more thought into it. Stuff like this will drain both our energy.