That might well be the best thing that any government could possibly do to drive open source adoption.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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thanks, California, but we didn't give a shit what you thought in the first place
Cool now get rid of the law entirely.
Sensible laws? That's not the world I grew up in. What the hell is happening.
Punish users. That's the only way they'll learn.
So we're taking that code out of systemd, right?
Open a PR. Maybe Poettering decides to merge it.
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"Please stop fighting this distopian law".
A big win for open source software software.
I'm not so sure. Probably they will block Linux users from certain sites. Not exactly what I'd call a win.
More of a non-loss, sort of. Digital ID being normalized in any respect is still a loss for everyone.
For now. These kinds of laws always enroach.
Wait... So if Linux doesn't have the api (sorry, the "signal" 🙄) how will sites that require it respond? What does it mean to be "exempt" - every user is considered to be an adult?
You're exempt from the service too probably.
Any corporate service that does this doesn't deserve us. Precious.
Ehhh, honestly I'm thinking it's more likely they'll block you. That's how these things tend to go in this age.
Kind of like how more and more of the Internet just outright blocks vpns.
This is my growing experience of using GrapheneOS.
Mostly everything works just fine. But certain apps don't, because they've made a choice to use Play store integrity. And there are more and more of them, including the UK government ID app. So I can't use my phone to verify my identity because I use a version of Android that's more secure than Google's.
And yeah, I can see it going this way with Linux. If you can't be verified using macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS (or whatever the new thing is) tools, then you become a second class digital citizen.
And that's why we need to build better and better tools for everyone.
It's very easy, a lot of these huge platforms are just corporate adware and military/intelligence propaganda machines, creating something real with real people will blow it out of the water.
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And why we need people who can hammer it home to our political classes that it's vitally important not to be stuck in an Apple/Google/Microsoft trap.
I mean that's what "exempt" means in this context.
Oh I understand what you meant now.
Are you implying "exempt from the service" means Linux gets blocked?
My tinfoil hat is telling me they’ll do this to make an outlaw of Linux and block it from services and sites. I hope my hat is wrong.
Keep that tinfoil hat close, I have a feeling Digital identification laws and ReadID technologies are actually moving the internet away from user anonymity, enabling a framework where users can be tied to real-world identities and easily sanctioned.
Make a post on the internet that someone objects to? boom, you just lost access to all your bank accounts.
I mean people connected to Peter Thiel are already bragging how they would love to do that
It's physically impossible to "outlaw Linux". That would mean outlawing the entirety of "The Cloud™".
You understand this was in the context of the user's side.
How would you even legislate that? "You can only use Linux if you're a registered business"? And how hard is it to register a one-person business in the US?
"You can only use Linux if your business has over X number of employees"? So make a non-profit business that "hires" anyone who wants to use Linux.
A game I payed long ago in my mobile requested me last week age verification.
Game lost...
I'm old enough to remember the Leisure Suit Larry series that used age verification by asking questions that kids probably wouldn't know (obviously this was long before the internet).
Game over. User wins.
AB 1856 doesn’t explicitly say that repos aren’t app stores, but a store’s main obligation under the law is to request an age signal from the user’s OS provider and pass it to developers; an exempt open-source OS produces no signal.
So what's the outcome of that? Are covered applications and application store to treat users as children when they don't get a signal from the OS?
Linux is now the backbone of everything. It you mess Linux up, so many things will break. They realized this finally.
Death nail for Windows
A new malaphor minted in the wild!
The two expressions you merged were:
- death knell for (thing)
- the final nail in the coffin for (something)
I just read it with a southern twang
"The final death in the coffin" would have some... interesting implications in a couple ways
Edit: also "death nail" means Microsoft started smoking
Death knell.
Linux users are incredible in their belief that issues of privacy, security, or data autonomy will push the masses away from what they're used to (OSX/Windows, Facebook/Reddit, etc) and towards better options (Linux, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc)
No, mate, absolutely nothing is gonna happen to Windows. It's gonna be perfectly fine. If we're lucky, there will be a 1-3% dip in user base towards Linux, but there's exactly 0% chance for a mass exodus that would make the upper management stop and think for a second.
I think they were assuming that people would use linux to dodge these restrictions. Ex. a teen who can't use a site on windows/ios might boot linux in an attempt to make it work. But as others have pointed out, it's more likely that sites will just blanket-flag a linux useragent as being used by a child to be safe. And then a linux user changing their useragent to get around this will then be hw attestation challenged like any other OS. So yeah, it's just going to make it more inconvenient to use an open system.
Unless a Linux UA allows for plausible deniability.
It could happen!
The first time a child is caught using Linux to circumvent this law, they'll update the law.
Colorado already did
Time to teach kids Linux
I still hoped they'd try to apply it broadly, if only to see the outcome of Ageless Linux
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