Such a stupid law.
Why is the OS responsible for verifying the age of people using Facebook or whatever?
Imagine if it was Jim Beam’s job to verify you were over 21.
«We really dont wanna deal with these nerds, lets just ignore them for now»
Also: << the nerds aren’t going to do any of this shit, so… let’s look like the good guys by exempting them so we don’t look terrible when the nerds show how obviously this is all security theater >>
Band-aid over an intolerable abuse.
No computer needs personally identifying information just to boot. You are an object, do as you’re told. There is no legitimate government interest that justifies this demand.
Linux locked out of age-gated services because it doesn’t have the necessary verification features and adoption stifles in 3…2…
But seriously do you think it’s really a good thing that the country seems to be moving forward with requiring ID to be online, and suddenly they’re like “oh pff Linux? Yeah don’t worry about that shit, it can be exempt whatever” like that makes it for Special Boys who can Keep Their Freedom and Tendies?
No man, it’ll be DRM’d off the internet. They’ll keep using it for servers since servers don’t need to verify their age to clients. This feels like an attempt to kill Linux on the desktop.
The correct thing would be to not have this law at all.
Can we please include the whole rest of the SPDX license list?
Or even better, restrict it to a few commercial ones?
The actual language in the law is “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software”. So yeah all the FOSS licenses and even some commercial ones are exempt, only the EULA-ridden shit (i.e. macOS and windows) is gonna be affected. I wonder if Google will start releasing “Chromiumbooks” with license terms that allow them to evade this law.
You may keep you projects for now nerds!
BTW System76, the company behind their Linux laptops and the Linux desktop COSMIC, was fighting hard against the law to make exemptions for Open Source software. That’s important for them, because System76 operates in California. So I think they are big part to thank for here: Colorado and California Exempt Open Source from Age Attestation (May 2026)
The way you currently say it, they tried to stop the exemption. They fought for the law, so OS gets an exemption.
Or do I understand you wrong?
Yeah, that was misunderstood. I said or meant “they was fighting against the law, so they can make an exemption”. To make it clear, the linked article from System76 goes into more detail. I just wanted bring attention to this, because the original linked article on tomshardware does not mention them.
This is good news. But why make this distinction? Why is this ok for FOSS but not other platforms?
Also private platforms are more likely to abuse this information.
Well, politics isn’t about finding the one principle to rule them all. The folks/companies that find restricting access to children important, probably don’t particularly care about some Linux devices being excluded. And other folks/companies find not restricting their Linux server really important, so that’s a compromise that can be made.
I imagine, they landed on specifically open-source being excluded as the more abstract rule, because open-source in particular has a problem here.
Anyone can download open-source software and run it. In most cases, there is no central backend, which could handle age verification.And even if there is, it’s not really financially viable to offer that for anyone who downloads the software for free. Requiring payment to access the binaries or the source code would also effectively kill the open-source ecosystem, which is also not in the interest of most people.
Because FOSS isn’t the problem. The problem the law seeks to address is profit-driven big businesses like Meta and Fortnite who don’t care to provide any protections for kids or actively target them in their manipulative behaviour, hence targeting the laws at the actual problem (non-FOSS software).
Nah. The problem the law seeks to address is more money for the rich and more power for the psychopaths. Actual care for children looks nothing close to this
But I can use Facebook and play Fortnite on Linux right?
Fortnite intentionally blocks Linux users. It will not run without their windows only rootkit.
Microsoft switching to a Linux kernel in…
They already have GDID which tracks you everywhere you go on the Internet and is tied to your $M💩 account
Why do you assume that Microsoft doesn’t want to comply?
Expense of getting and staying compliant.
If they didn’t want it, they would have lobbied against it.
What expense? Adding one more thing to track about you, especially something they already know and essentially just need to verify, cannot be that expensive.
I don’t think that is a problem for Microsoft, especially because they would want your ID and age, tracking you as much as possible already. Also you don’t just change the Kernel just like that, there are licenses attached, drivers and other stuff. From technical point of view, in current implementation it is probably impossible. Let alone Microsoft would face issues with compatibility. If we put the technical difficulties aside, I don’t even think Microsoft is against this law and pretty much wants it.
They could just change the license of their codebase, if that’s what they wanted to do. No way in hell they care about users enough though, and probably most windows users still don’t care enough even about this to jump ship.
Has Apple fully open sourced macOS?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accounts-billing/manage/verify-your-age-microsoft-account
I haven’t been following this particular law, but I’ve always wondered how it would have been implemented for servers.
Even windows has a server edition I believe, if a corporation is using a windows server, would one of their IT employees have to verify it themselves?
What about IOT operating systems, docker/podman containers, router firmware, and so on. Not sure if they address these things in the legal code or not.This is good new for california, I believe atleast colorado has a similar law being proposed as well. Hope they take notes from cali.
It’s fundamentally unenforceable, even if they tried to do what they’ve done to phones and not allow other OS’s to be installed, you could still get development boxes, embedded boxes, etc that by nature of being what they are could not have locked boot loaders.
Is it even technically possible to enforce it on open-source application, with code readily available for tweaks and modifications?
Would it not be someone that would make the modification?
CDDL not mentioned. Have fun illumos!
GPL edition of Windows coming when?
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