Subject: California Lawmakers Unanimously Pass Open-Source Exemption From Age-Verification Law

The US state of California passed a bill last year <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/california-introduces-age-verification-law>,
due to take effect from next year, requiring all ?operating system
providers? to collect (self-reported) age information from users of
their platforms, and pass that on to app developers.

This caused consternation among developers of open-source operating
systems, who (by design) do not have the degree of control over, and
insight into, their user base that owners of proprietary platforms
have available.

Now, the California state legislators have agreed that this is an
unreasonable burden on purveyors of software ?under license terms that
permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify? (exactly what
FLOSS licences allow), so they have passed an amendment excluding
these from the requirement.

There are a couple of other exclusions added in this amendment, one
seemingly (we hope) drawing a distinction between Linux distro repos
(exempt) and Apple/Google/Microsoft-style app stores (covered), and
another to do with stores only offering addons to run within host
apps. Both of these seem a little less clear to me.

<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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