California just told Linux it doesn't need a babysitter.
California's legislature passed Assembly Bill 1856, an amendment exempting open-source operating systems from the state's Digital Age Assurance Act months before that law takes effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate passed the amendment 39-0 on August 26, and the Assembly concurred the next day. AB 1856 now heads to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original age-assurance law last October. The fix redefines "operating system provider" to exclude anything distributed under terms that let users copy, redistribute, and modify it, a test that GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses all pass, covering Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family, along with package repositories like apt and pacman.
Without this carve-out, Linux distributions with no central account system or corporate owner would have needed to somehow collect age data at setup, alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. The amendment also deletes a drafting error that had technically classified every California device owner as a child, and it bars anyone from requesting an age signal unless the law actually requires one, closing off a channel that could have doubled as general-purpose tracking.
Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android still face the January 2027 deadline, so the law now splits along a fault line the original text never drew: proprietary platforms collect age signals, open-source ones don't have to. SteamOS remains a gray area, since Valve bundles its open-source Arch base with a proprietary Steam client, while GrapheneOS, built entirely on MIT and Apache code, is now clearly outside the law's reach in California even as it still answers to Brazil's separate age-verification statute.