this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 1 points 17 hours ago

Because, as I already mentioned, the companies behind those distros are based in North Carolina and the UK, respectively, not California. It makes no sense for them to comply with a silly law in California, when they could just as easily rent servers outside of CA to their clients based there for whatever business needs they have, tell their clients to figure out compliance for the clients on their own, and ignore the law. Otherwise, they would have to take on the perpetual responsibility of maintaining compliance not only for their own contributions that they pack in their respective distros, but also for any upstream contributions that would be subject to these laws by upstream contributors they have no control or influence over. If some dev from Poland comes up with a great new idea for the kernel and it gets widely adopted, but doesn't comply with this law (because why would a Polish dev waste their free time adding this?), now Red Hat or Canonical would have to either forgo those new features that their clients will be hearing about, or waste time and money reviewing all these commits to make sure they don't miss any contributions that would touch on something covered by this law and updating and supporting their updates to ensure compliance.

Even if they did want to comply with the law to be able to sell their OSes in California, it would open up a huge can of legal liabilities for them that is nearly entirely dependent upon the actions and work of individuals they don't control, and they have plenty of trivial ways of circumventing California's jurisdiction if they decided doing so was the better course of action.