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Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”
The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead.
Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.
Unlike Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, most Linux distributions are not centrally controlled commercial platforms. Many are community-run projects maintained by volunteers, often without user accounts, telemetry systems, or even formal corporate ownership structures. Critics argued the law’s wording was so broad that it could technically force open-source operating systems to become age-verification platforms.
Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the legislation as invasive and warned it could create infrastructure for broader identity tracking online. Linux developers also questioned how California could realistically enforce such requirements on infinitely forkable open-source software projects.
The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems. Valve
AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted.
California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @04:47PM (9 children)
I still haven't seen a coherent explanation why FOSS can't just operate in default "under 13" mode.
So I'm running the "under 13" restricted version of ANTLR, GCC, and GDB. Which will be the same as the normal version of ANTLR GCC and GDB. So this would affect my life how, exactly?
Let's say I'm pondering the JQ. The JSON processor-filter-multitool JQ. To, I donno, parse weather data because I'm bored. JQ gets handed a flag from the OS that I'm under 13. This will impact me precisely how?
Lets thought experiment and imagine I say "Go ahead make my day, ship me a copy of "hexdump" from util-linux that accepts the "under 13" date flag." The worst case outcome will be...
Let me guess, hexdump won't accept decimal 360456 as an input because that can be converted to hex 0x58008 and you type that into your calculator and flip it upside down and it reads as "boobs"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bd on Thursday May 28, @05:18PM (1 child)
I don't know. I would not want to be the person that checks if every single debian package is pg13...
Maybe hunt the wumpus gets tagged for photorealistic violence?
Would you guarantee all source code comments by Linus are safe for work?
On a more serious note, I think there are a few open source ego shooters that would at least need to be evaluated if the law applied...
And if you install steam you definitely get an app store that can provide NSFW stuff.
The idiocy is that this law requires the OS to verify. Why not the app store? Did they think every OS has an app store?
And the general idea sucks of course. Laws do not replace parenting.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @06:01PM
Well yeah but this is a chicken vs egg thing where the law has little to no comment about what is or should be censored, its only specifying that somehow my linux-running clothes washing machine needs to know how old the operator is to pass along an age range to the software running on the OS. Or maybe I misremember and my clothes washer runs FreeRTOS it doesn't really matter the legal requirement is the same for either Linux or FreeRTOS. Its not a QNX based washing machine I'd remember that LOL. My clothes washing machine runs an OS and that OS needs to tattle on the operator's age according to various state laws. What the clothes washier application software will do with an operator age is a mystery to me.
WRT censorship my primary personal experience is the local Barnes and Noble very much non-free bookstore always has a table up of "banned books on sale" and my public library usually has a "banned books" shelf/section. And people complain about book banning being bad and evil and awful usually while very carefully avoiding any discussion of whats being banned because it should probably have been burned and ironically nothing increases sales and availability like banning it. Really the best thing junk food companies could do to increase profits is get the government to try and ban junk food. Likewise, a fedgov initiative to "ban little kids from seeing pr0n" will inevitably result in little kids getting MUCH more exposure to pr0n, probably forced exposure at schools and stores. So I'm ironically somewhat opposed to the whole thing, because the outcome will just be infinite groomers pushing "access to censored material as a free speech issue" making it worse than skipping the problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday May 28, @05:20PM (3 children)
You might use your linux box as a dev box but plenty of people use linux boxes as media centres (me included). You just screwed up a use case. What about SteamOS? Thanks for screwing up my stuff.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Thursday May 28, @05:51PM (1 child)
I don't think anything on my media center has a valid rating/age coding. Emby is just direct streaming a sequence of bytes from an officially unknown source to my Roku streamer boxes. The Roku's are not FOSS and you need a credit card to buy one and install the emby app from their app store. Similar to how my OPNsense firewall doesn't do deep packet inspection of user age, the emby streamer doesn't care, feed it a file and it slowly squirts it out to a streamer hardware device like a Roku.
A fair number of video files can't ever have a legal rating applied to them. "grandma's 80th birthday party.mp4" and "kids little league season 2007.mp4" and similar home movie stuff. Yeah sure by percentage the files are mostly "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" but those guys have nothing to gain from distributing age-locked files either.
This would make things weird for SteamOS I'd agree with that. But they're not a FOSS org, its an entirely non-FOSS ecosystem with entirely non-FOSS problems.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28, @09:27PM
The problem is the obvious next step is the banning of media without the age verification. You're saying it will only control stuff that is flagged as over PG13, but it's much more likely to be implemented as requiring default deny, not default allow.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 28, @08:58PM
How about Gentoo which can be built from source using the "F the man!" patch? I would guess that the powers that be don't want to train more kids how to do that.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28, @08:08PM (1 child)
Some pot would do you wonders. What the fuck is ANTLR?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 29, @06:56PM
Boomers invented lex/yacc, the gen X-ers suffered for their parent's sins, and the zoomies invented antlr to avoid lex/yacc
antlr does the same thing, but differently enough to be a PITA.
Let me guess, now you're going to ask what is a lex/yacc. Back in the day you had to be able to compile your own C software get get on the internet and it was glorious.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 29, @01:12AM
1. Adults should be able to look at adult material if they want to, and not have to install proprietary software in order to do it.
2. These laws aren't really about protecting kids from anything, they're about collecting personally identifying information so authorities can now figure out exactly who is doing what online. Including but not limited to their adult material habits.
3. If FOSS does not allow the viewing of adult material under any circumstances, and proprietary OS's do, then most people will continue to adopt proprietary OS's, even if FOSS is technically superior. See VHS vs Betamax.
4. This breaks a key principle of FOSS, which is if it's my machine, I should be able to control what it does and not somebody else.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin