California passes AB-1856, exempting Linux distros from age law

The California Assembly voted 69-0 to pass AB-1856, an amendment that carves open-source operating systems out of the state's Digital Age Assurance Act. Per Tom's Hardware, the fix redefines "operating system provider" to exclude any entity that distributes software "under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software," and any project shipped under the GPL, MIT, BSD, or Apache licenses meets that test.

That is enough to lift Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family out of the law's compliance scope. A separate clarification says "Application" does not include software components not offered to consumers as standalone executable applications through covered application stores, which is the language that shields package-manager plumbing on those systems. The scoping question keeps recurring across our open-source coverage this quarter.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks wrote both the Digital Age Assurance Act and this amendment, and introduced the exemption in February after criticism from Linux developers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The underlying law, Phoronix reports, takes effect on January 1, 2027, requiring age collection at device setup and age-bracket signals for non-exempt applications.

The Senate then passed the amended bill 39-0 on August 26, with the Assembly clearing the concurrence vote the following day. AB-1856 now sits on Governor Gavin Newsom's desk; he signed the original act into law last October. The EFF still opposes the package, arguing in an EFF deeplinks post that the amended law "expands rather than narrows" the age-gating framework by pulling web browsers and website operators into the age-signal pipeline.