I credit Minecraft with getting an entire generation comfortable using command line statements.

The thing is, unfortunately most people will not notice and be aware of what this means. (and which effect it may have on market share etc.)

And most techies are already primarily on Linux and its derivatives.

Linux phones, Linux gaming machines, Linux on Desktop and Laptops, Linux VR/AR, Linux watches, etc.

So I run my app in a linux container under windows and I'm exempt from age verification? Isn't android linux under the hood? I'm sure the law is not so easy to get around. How does it work?

System 76, framework and a pinebook I am covered.

And it always will be!

so... we are back to a monopoly, but now government-enforced one

Is 2027 the year of the Linux desktop?

I'm a lifelong Apple fan but my kids have Steam Decks and Raspberry Pis. I hope they grow to love Linux.

Yes and the end of locked down Apple iDevices.

I've been hearing about this since the late 90s.

I'm not sure it is very bad that facebook won't be accessible from Linux.

That would be a big win for linux users

How do you ban access to a website based on the OS of the user?

TBH, OS based parental filters are the optimal solution here, especially if implemented in a proper way.

Kids don't buy phones and computers, parents do. When setting up the account for the first time, the parents could set the account to be an "underage one", all the apps, browsers, etc., would get the USER_IS_UNDERAGE flag and filter content according to that. No need for every site to ask and verify the age, just set the date of birth at the time of purchase, set a parental password (for possible future changes, reselling, etc.) and prohibit formats/wipes/factory resets without a parental password being entered. The clerks in telco stores could even help with the first setup of that.

Same could be easily implemented in linux, via some user flag set by the su/sudo user during the first eg. ubuntu install.

"people" didn't ask for age verification; they asked for Facebook to be shut down because it's a social hazard for children.

Facebook was the excuse (and there's a no zero chance Meta funded the initiative themselves). The government's worldwide jumped on it so quickly partially becsuse they've been trying to find aan excuse to control the internet for decades. Never dismiss how quick they are to push stuff like this but how slow they are to enact actual positive change for the people.

That commit message mentions laws from California, Colorado, and Brazil. Today’s article is only about how the Californian law is inapplicable. It seems to me that the feature is still valid.

The PR mentions not just California but other states and countries, so I dont think California's exemption alone changes the situation

Man that PR is a complete mess.

For WSL, there will still need to be a passthrough.

I have no problem with that as long as it's not the government controlling the age verification. It should be a parent. And as a parent I want the ability to properly control my children's devices - the fact that Apple, and especially Google pretty much ignored this feature until now is a big part of why we have these dumb laws in the first place.

Think about it - if every phone you got asked you at first config "are you over 18? If not ask a parent to set up this device" then everyone would know about that capability and "think of the children" would be met with "parents can just click a button"...

Systemd is paid for by Big Business, so they will retain user-identification information in the long run of course. Poettering will never revert what he is paid for by the TechBros.

Probably not, given there is a specific sect of OSS that embraces authoritarianism.

Why not just have it be one of the 85 million reasons to not use systemd? Is always been awful.

I testified against the equivalent of this bill in my state. One of the things I mentioned is because of a non-trivial monetary fine per infraction [1], as someone who would potentially need to implement this, I would have no idea how to reliably differentiate a computer that was simply out-of-date/implementation has bugs from willful non-compliance vs Open Source [2].

It just felt like the bill had the goals it had when it was created, and the broader cloud of "gee, if people implement this a certain way, it could have unintended consequences" was completely ignored. But don't worry, one of the co-sponsors proclaimed. near the end of the hearing, that they had a Masters Degree in Computer Science and worked on operating systems in their career, so they made sure to let us know that we were over-reacting.

The other thing that really pissed me off was it was rumored my states bill was going to get an open source exemption. However, they waited until the end of the hearing to introduce all of the amendments, including the Open Source exemption. The proposed amendments were not publicly visible on the bill page or the page about the committee meeting for that day. This ended up being an excellent strategy to sway other committee members [3], since they could just hand wave the bulk of us as "concerns resolved". It was quite illuminating to also see media lobbyists come in and verbatim just state "hey did you get our proposed amendments?" and then without much reading of them at all, they were ratified during that session. Lesson learned: the moment there was a rumor of amendment, I should have made a considerable effort to get my hands on that text ahead of time since for the implementation concerns I raised, I was still unhappy. I'm not quite sure though how much of a difference it would have made though, since at least 30 other people fell into the same trap.

Anyhow, hopefully my long-winded Sunday morning post was useful to someone in the future either when dealing with compliance, a version of the bill in their own states, or the federal government's attempts to do a similar thing. I confess that I have been lazy and not remotely done any due diligence on that federal bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250... / HR-8250: Parent's Decide Act). I encourage others to be better than me and contact their representatives, assuming it isn't already on the fast track to becoming law.

[1] at least, for smaller businesses -- big tech won't care! I think it was something like $6,000/pop, which is chump change for big tech and will be negotiated during settlement talks.

[2] Okay, you can check the user agents. But who wants to need to maintain or pull in a list of enforceable user agents! What happens if someone is spoofing the UA and suddenly they end up in my list of "must check" UAs (or inversely, !(not must check)). How long does one reasonably wait for the API call to time out? What about running the app on Wine? And most importantly, what if someone that doesn't care about Linux ("okay claude make my website legal no mistakes") is in charge of implementing this logic, or the library that people will end up using for compliance.

[3] Assuming they cared. The vote was largely amongst partisan lines, some people had clearly looked checked out the whole time, despite the abnormally high numbers of their constituents being there that day.

Good. I’d rather have free computing than the modern web.

Privacy laws don't prevent foreign entities from influencing elections and making children addicted.

> if you wanted to prevent harm from the internet you would start with proper privacy laws

Explain how a privacy that protects you and me will somehow not protect a pedophile. How does that work?

I am FOR privacy. I don't think it can be done.

I do not want to have any information at all stored anywhere, encrypted, decentralized or otherwise. Nada. Its just text. I want to just be a number in everyone database. I want to be able to spawn millions of numbers that will never be related to each other. My ideal privacy world is a world where bots thrive.

Just go to face to face discussion if you care so much about who you are talking to.

Yes also BSD and friends.

From TFA

> These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.

According to the article: "it's any OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”"

The article then explicitly cite "Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family".

There is also another exclusion for libraries and software from a packages managers like apt and pacman.

So from my understanding ReactOS, hobby OS but also CP/M, FreeDOS, Haiku or Collapse OS...

They include the majority of OSI licenses, including BSD. So the majority of BSD variants are included.

Anything that’s open source

Why shouldn't open source get special treatment? Public laws should recognize and incentivize public goods.

Technically opensource stays the same. The special treatment is for closed source OSes that get an additional legal protection for their datamining. We should not be passing laws that legalize the datamining of people.

It's an operating system, and they are making it mandatory for operating systems to collect user's age, it's mentioned in the article.

Lawmakers—contemporary and otherwise—have in fact decided many many times that the state can deprive you of your life as punishment for certain crimes.

MacOS isn't Darwin and comes under terms that do not fit rhe criteria of the exception. Apple actually did go to some lengths in the past to ensure that all layers of MacOS contained bits that they could claim restrictive licenses on.

A project like PureDarwin, however, can be freely distributed because it omits Apple's proprietary parts.

> copy, redistribute, and modify the software

I can copy and redistribute macOS binaries, and I can write programs/extensions that modify macOS.

These vague terms show that legislators are incapable of regulating software effectively; but they do create an enduring legal franchise to deal with their confusion.

I don't consider that sensible at all. The law is supposed to protect children. It's hypocritical to exempt certain operating systems from the law, and, to be honest, I'm astonished this is legal/constitutional in California.

It’s saying that, for example, Chrome on Linux isn’t required to ask for the user’s age in order to filter extensions

A quick search suggests that 3D-printed guns being used in crime is an actual, for-real, and growing problem.

I take it that you wouldn't be OK with somebody building a uranium enrichment facility in their backyard for their hobby reactor. So there is a line to be drawn on where people's freedom to tinker ends; it's just a question of where you draw it.

Personally, I think given there is an actual documented, non-isolated problem with 3D printed guns being used for violent crime, there's a debate to be had that's more sophisticated than "REGULATION BAD".

Practically, the components of Android which mandate a user account are not distributed so that the user can modify them. The exemption does not apply.

If you had an agent in the legislature wouldn’t you prefer exactly one of this form? My ideal representative is able to command support from diverse interests and subtly damages those opposed to me while subtly advantaging the principles I believe in - making compromises necessary to move incrementally to a state more aligned with what I wish it to be.

The reality is that many people want bad laws. Without the support of those people one does not get elected.

This use of people for power while de-facto disenfranchising them is pretty widespread already. For instance, some half of California and Texas are responsible for their strength in the electoral college while simultaneously being entirely disenfranchised when electing the President. Good technique.

Those are also covered.

> software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt

The law just says open source OS’ don’t count. It does not mention Linux by name - nor does it specify which licenses.

The bill exempts:

> 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

which at least doesn't choose specific winners and losers among licenses. It does disfavor license-free and public domain software, which isn't great.

Engineers and scientists would like to imagine our society operates off a specification. But laws are only justifications for what people in power want to do. All of what you’re talking about reinforces the myth that the text matters and is precisely defined.

Software development is slower in larger, more political organisations (hello Change Advisory Boards) and larger/older/sprawling codebases.

Most governments are huge, highly political, slow moving organisations. It seems to just come with the territory: slower rollout of changes, longer periods to observe the changes in the wild (throw in a few years to see how the law plays in legal cases/challenges), and suddenly you have fewer iterations to get it right.

> The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method.

It's not? It has been "agile" for centuries. It is constantly patched as someone wants to address some issue. It's rather rare for a completely new law to be written.

> Lawmakers try to plan for everything

It's not? They see one bug, e.g. children being exploited, now they tried it with a patch that is horribly broken and doesn't really work, so they patched it again, to remediate one issue, while they try to figure out more patches.

It's also hilarious how poorly defined so many laws are. So many loopholes and bugs everywhere. Probably because most lawyers/politicians are effectively illiterate when it comes to logic.

California is a common law jurisdiction. Judges evaluate cases and make rulings based on the intent of the law instead of the literal text as written in order to avoid absurdities, setting precedent for future similar cases. If the lawmakers disagree with case law, they amend the law.

What do you want people to say? "Yay, the terrible law that threatened to make free computing illegal has an exemption for Linux. Now we only have to deal with unwanted mandatory age verification on all our non-linux devices. I'm so happy."

I habitually complain about government... so let me help you out with this.

The original issue with the law was never that those poor open source developers were going to have to bear the burden of complying with the law, but that the law itself was a bald-faced invasion of privacy by an overbearing troupe of people in power (i.e., government) so shit-sure of their superiority over the simple common folk they govern (i.e., you and me) that they aren't even embarrassed by their own arrogance.

I would suggest that what "we wanted" is no such law at all. What would be weird, and worthy of comment, is if those of us that complain about government were actually satisfied by an exemption which only applies to pretty damn tiny slice of the market. If anything, that wasn't a victory for privacy or common sense, but rather a concession that they had foolishly created a law that they wouldn't have been able to enforce as broadly as they thought they could get away with... or if they tried to enforce it they'd have to contend with the optics of the big hand of government yet again crushing individuals whose only real crime was their altruism rather than just some giant corporation.

So it isn't weird at all that "we're" silent. This isn't a win. Pointing out that the law had unintended consequences, including with Linux, et al., wasn't a statement of objective but rather a simple show that the law was rife with thoughtless unintended, or perhaps simply unspoken, consequences. The legislature's act here didn't restore privacy nor did it remove bad outcomes: if anything it now just raises questions about equal protection under law, at least on some practical level. It raises the question why some users of computers need such protections as age verification and others don't, and why the licensing terms of the OS are a valid proxy for that need... taking for granted that the stated purposes of the law are the real ones, of course.

A lot of people are not stupid. Age verification is a backdoor for control. I read and did not even bother to comment, it's like yay, that horrendous thing they were trying to do now it's not applied to everyone. I'm also sorry for California, such a beautiful place and full of wonderful people. I hope it will recover one day.

They shouldn't need to pass this if they didn't pass age verification at all.

This is not a good thing, it's a very small patch for a very bad thing.

This is not wanted, its duct taping a bad idea even further and i half-wish MS/apple/co sue against it. This may cause lawmakers to bounce back in the wrong direction though.

Yeah, this is fantastic. Should be top of the page. I’m honestly shocked, I’ve fully internalized that everything is corrupt and beholden to big corporations. Somehow, a victory! Looks like the Linux Foundation and EFF pushed back, but they’re not exactly big. Good job, California lawmakers!

What a pointlessly provocative and unproductive thing to say.

"Delivers something they wanted" is the most bizarre way possible to phrase "followed through with the majority of a reprehensible agenda and were forced to carve out an exception due to technical constraints and massive blowback."

When people pointed out the consequences this would have for open source, that did not mean what they wanted was an open source exemption. It was just meant to demonstrate just how poorly conceived the law is that nobody at any point even thought about this before it was signed in. Frankly the consequences for open source are not even at the forefront of concerns about what these rushed regulations will do to the world.

The age verification requirement wasn't dropped, what are you talking about? Linux getting an exemption isn't a win.

It delivered an arbitrary exception to a stupid law. If all someone wanted was an exception for Linux, they don’t understand the problem with this law.

They didn't "deliver something we wanted". They decided NOT to fuck us over. I guess we should thank them for that?

Indeed, this is very generous of them, and we should be thankful.

To use your metaphor, this is saying that a store needs to limit you to the kids section if it is told you are a kid at the door. The exemption here is because a park doesn't have doors to perform this check onto.

(PS. I'd hope we were past trying to hamfist physical metaphors to describe the digital landscape. But alas).