California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt

Finally, some good fucking food news.

From the article:

California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day.

[...]

A second exclusion removes software components that aren’t “offered to consumers as a stand-alone executable application through a covered application store” from the law’s definition of an application, covering libraries and dependencies distributed through package managers like apt and pacman.[...] A 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.

[...]

In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law. That closes off potential abuse of the age API that could have led to it being used as a general-purpose data collection channel even when age verification wasn’t required.

So from what I can gather, this amendment...

• ...exempts all open-source software from being considered an "operating system provider," thus immunizing it to almost the whole bill.
• ...does the same for libraries or other software prerequisites.
• ...improved good-faith liability protections.
• ...removed a terrible definition of what a "user" was.
• ...made it clear that application age checks will not be required past initial account creation
• ...explicitly prohibits sharing age data for any reason not required by law.

I love this in particular, because whereas previously the bill could've been a problem for Linux in the sense that tech giants are better-positioned to take on regulatory requirements than a distro would be, now the DAAA is instead a boon for open source software. Linux can now offer you privacy that closed-source software is legally barred from having! Incredible.

Don't get me wrong, the DAAA still looks clumsy at best. But this is an absolutely massive improvement in every way I can tell.