What's this about?
California lawmakers unanimously passed an exemption to the state's age-verification law for software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD and Apache licences. The Linux Foundation and EFF pushed for it.
Why did an age-verification law threaten Linux?
Because these laws impose obligations on whoever "distributes" software to minors — verify age, gate access, keep records. That model assumes a distributor with an account system, a payment relationship and a legal entity. A Linux distribution has a mirror network, no accounts, no payments and often no company. Applied literally, the requirement is not onerous for free software; it is impossible, which would make distribution itself unlawful. Exempting by licence is a blunt instrument that happens to draw the line in roughly the right place.
What's the community saying?
HN 715 points, 345 comments
- The most-upvoted comment is a jab at the thread's own politics: the people who habitually complain about government are conspicuously quiet when it delivers what they wanted.
- Genuine surprise runs through the thread — several people say they had fully internalised that everything is captured by big corporations, and this is a real win for two comparatively small organisations.
- The immediate limitation: Android is still covered, and whether AOSP counts as open source under this exemption is contested.
- A sub-thread on GrapheneOS potentially qualifying, and the half-joke that this would incentivise teenagers to learn to flash their own phones.