Linux

California just voted to exempt Linux from its age-verification law

California lawmakers unanimously passed an exemption for Linux from the state's age-verification law.

Unanimous is the interesting detail. It means nobody in the room wanted to defend the original text, and the reason is a modeling error rather than a political one. The law assumed something true of iOS and Android and false of Linux: that an operating system has a vendor. A company that ships it, can be made to hold an age signal, and can be held liable when it does not. Linux has distributions, maintainers and users who compile their own. There is no party at the other end of the obligation, so the obligation was not strict, it was undefined.

Worth noting what the carve-out does not do. It removes an unenforceable duty from one class of operating system and leaves the rest of the scheme standing, so the compliance weight stays exactly where it already was, on app stores and browsers. The pattern is the thing to watch as more of these bills land. Legislation that names an OS-level chokepoint quietly assumes the OS is a company, and every time software exists that has no company behind it, the text has to be patched after the fact.

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/california-lawmakers-unanimously-pass-linux-exemption-from-age-verification-law-software-distributed-under-the-gpl-mit-bsd-and-apache-licenses-are-exempt

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