California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this?

E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Excellent. From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!

We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes.

The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.

I'm confused. If I was a kid, I can still get my cigarettes at the Linux store? (By analogy with eastern Europe where age checks are lax.)

Or is the idea that the Linux store is not allowed to sell cigarettes anymore?

this bill fixes nothing. if you wanted to prevent harm from the internet you would start with proper privacy laws. but we all know why that will never happen

> (2) “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

Where does MacOS and iOS fit then? The core of both those operating systems (darwin) is open source (APSL licensed).

Linux?

Or also BSD, ReactOS, hobby OS #24562 etc... ?

My gut reaction to this is that there is something seriously wrong if special clauses are required. Why should open source get special treatment, to me that just highlights that the law is utterly ridiculous.

Now do it with all open source licenses, not just the most popular.

I love that Microsoft is committing a crime by continuing to let me use Win10

I'm starting to warm up to this law. So many loopholes. Nothing to worry about. I think California's incompetence has finally progressed from "proposes bad laws" to "proposes and botches the implementation of bad laws"

Rest of the headline: "software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt"

And then further into the text it's clarified that there also isn't a specific list of open licenses, as the terrible headline would have you believe, but instead a description of what is considered open

With the caveat that I haven't read the actual legal text, this seems to be an eminently sensible law (it'd be better if it weren't needed, but here we are).

In summary: not a Linux exemption, and not an exemption for a specific list of licenses either.

Laws need to be managed like software: There should be a process for testing, user feedback, quick patches for bugs or conflicts, and regular updates to fix issues. If you think about it, both laws and software are called "code".

The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method. Lawmakers try to plan for everything, laws meant to solve one problem face feature creep and create a thousand others, then no one wants to touch anything after launch for fear of making things worse or because that one guy uses the temperature of his CPU as a quick-key and refuses to change his workflow.

Anyways, no law is perfect and never will be, and neither are the fixes.

Cool now let's exempt hobbyists from the 3-D printer must certify you are not printing gun parts pending legislation.

Can someone the exemption for browser extensions and other contained software? My best guess is that the OS > Browser are reporting the age already, and the browser extensions will also use that "signal". Is this close enough?

" third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, which takes browser extension stores out of scope."

Weird how the people who habitually complain about government are conspicuously silent when it delivers something they wanted.

And now a bunch of OSI-Approved licenses get to have special rules applied to them, entrenching them and killing further innovation.

Now do FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD... =p

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AGPL…?