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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, 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.