California's legislature passes a bill exempting open-source OSes like Linux from a 2025 age-verification law; Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain in scope (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

California's legislature has passed a bill exempting open-source operating systems, such as Linux, from a 2025 age-verification law. The bill, Assembly Bill 1856, amends the Digital Age Assurance Act and removes open-source OSes from its scope. According to Tom's Hardware, this change means Linux distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu will not have to collect user age data during account setup.

The exemption applies to operating systems distributed under license terms that permit copying, redistribution, and modification, such as the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses. This also covers software components that are not offered as standalone executable applications through a covered application store. The bill has been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.

The law will still apply to proprietary operating systems like Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. The exemption was added through an amendment to the bill, which was passed by the Senate in a 39-0 vote and accepted by the Assembly.

Brief written by urgent.news from Techmeme, Tom's Hardware — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.