{"id":332675,"date":"2026-05-26T10:07:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T10:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/332675\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T10:07:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T10:07:14","slug":"california-and-colorado-age-verification-laws-get-open-source-os-exemptions-steamos-enforcement-still-likely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/332675\/","title":{"rendered":"California and Colorado Age Verification Laws Get Open-Source OS Exemptions\u2014SteamOS Enforcement Still Likely"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amid the controversy about the upcoming California and Colorado age verification laws, System76 CEO, Carl Richell, revealed that he was meeting with lawmakers to champion exemptions that would allow open-source operating systems, like Linux distributions, to forego the inclusion of such age verification systems. As reported by GamingOnLinux, Article 30 of Colorado Senate Bill 26-051, now available online in its final form<\/a>, now states that the article does not apply to “an operating system provider or developer that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software without any platform-imposed technical or contractual restrictions imposed by the provider or developer on installing all modified versions.” <\/p>\n

For its part, the California Digital Age Assurance Act, bill AB 1856<\/a>, now contains similar verbiage relating to open-source OS providers, except California excludes open-source developers from the bill entirely. A recent amendment to the bill reads: “‘Operating system provider’ does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” These exemptions functionally mean that most Linux distributions will not require users to submit information for age verifications, although the water gets a bit murkier with dual-license distributions, like SteamOS. In the case of SteamOS, although the underlying Arch Linux-based distribution is open-source and exempt, the included Steam Client is still a proprietary app store that will likely require age data. Notably there does not seem to be an exception in the California bill for open-source or similarly licensed browsers, which means open-source browsers, like Firefox and Chromium, may still need to build in support to request the signal for age attestation from the operating system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid the controversy about the upcoming California and Colorado age verification laws, System76 CEO, Carl Richell, revealed that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-332675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}