The PR mentions not just California but other states and countries, so I dont think California's exemption alone changes the situation
cm2187 2 hours ago [-]
Excellent. From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Linux phones, Linux gaming machines, Linux on Desktop and Laptops, Linux VR/AR, Linux watches, etc.
dgoldstein0 1 hours ago [-]
Or more likely companies and people will just comply. It might give a little more fuel to open source from people who are ardently pro privacy that balk at an age signal bring implemented, but I don't think that's such a huge segment of users.
close04 2 hours ago [-]
And then the exception will evaporate overnight.
shuwix 2 hours ago [-]
One gotta love politicians and their "solutions" and their longevity.
theasisa 10 minutes ago [-]
I've been hearing about this since the late 90s.
injidup 1 hours ago [-]
So I run my app in a linux container under windows and I'm exempt from age verification? Isn't android linux under the hood? I'm sure the law is not so easy to get around. How does it work?
1718627440 1 hours ago [-]
I know it sounds like a joke again, but the GNU/Linux <-> Linux distinction is kinda important semantically.
dgoldstein0 1 hours ago [-]
It sounds like since Android is a commercial repackaging of Linux it's in scope and Google gets to figure it out.
vbezhenar 16 minutes ago [-]
Google literally backed and supported this law.
NooneAtAll3 22 minutes ago [-]
so... we are back to a monopoly, but now government-enforced one
red_admiral 40 minutes ago [-]
We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes.
The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.
johnnyanmac 14 minutes ago [-]
Facebook was the excuse (and there's a no zero chance Meta funded the initiative themselves). The government's worldwide jumped on it so quickly partially becsuse they've been trying to find aan excuse to control the internet for decades. Never dismiss how quick they are to push stuff like this but how slow they are to enact actual positive change for the people.
rbbydotdev 2 hours ago [-]
this bill fixes nothing. if you wanted to prevent harm from the internet you would start with proper privacy laws. but we all know why that will never happen
nottorp 2 hours ago [-]
Linux?
Or also BSD, ReactOS, hobby OS #24562 etc... ?
throw-qqqqq 1 hours ago [-]
Yes also BSD and friends.
From TFA
> These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.
miniwark 54 minutes ago [-]
According to the article: "it's any OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”"
The article then explicitly cite "Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family".
There is also another exclusion for libraries and software from a packages managers like apt and pacman.
So from my understanding ReactOS, hobby OS but also CP/M, FreeDOS, Haiku or Collapse OS...
deaddodo 1 hours ago [-]
They include the majority of OSI licenses, including BSD. So the majority of BSD variants are included.
kennywinker 59 minutes ago [-]
> (2) “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.
Where does MacOS and iOS fit then? The core of both those operating systems (darwin) is open source (APSL licensed).
w10-1 34 minutes ago [-]
> copy, redistribute, and modify the software
I can copy and redistribute macOS binaries, and I can write programs/extensions that modify macOS.
These vague terms show that legislators are incapable of regulating software effectively; but they do create an enduring legal franchise to deal with their confusion.
SahAssar 2 minutes ago [-]
You cannot. The apple license has multiple restrictions on that prevent you from copying, modifying and redistribution, for example:
> No Reverse Engineering. You may not, and you agree not to or enable others to, copy (except as expressly permitted by this License or by the Usage Rules if they are applicable to you), decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, attempt to derive the source code of, decrypt, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any services provided by the Apple Software or any part thereof (except as and only to the extent any foregoing restriction is prohibited by applicable law or by licensing terms governing use of Open-Sourced Components that may be included with the Apple Software).
MacOS isn't Darwin and comes under terms that do not fit rhe criteria of the exception. Apple actually did go to some lengths in the past to ensure that all layers of MacOS contained bits that they could claim restrictive licenses on.
A project like PureDarwin, however, can be freely distributed because it omits Apple's proprietary parts.
kennywinker 42 minutes ago [-]
Macos contains elements that are open licensed. Many linux distros contain elements that are closed source. Where is the line?
This law describes as a true-false something that is not only true or false. This law is poorly written. Amending it didn’t fix that.
card_zero 12 minutes ago [-]
Call in a Reasonable Person, when the position of the line is in question.
pipes 56 minutes ago [-]
My gut reaction to this is that there is something seriously wrong if special clauses are required. Why should open source get special treatment, to me that just highlights that the law is utterly ridiculous.
roosterIllusi0n 16 minutes ago [-]
Technically opensource stays the same. The special treatment is for closed source OSes that get an additional legal protection for their datamining. We should not be passing laws that legalize the datamining of people.
conartist6 2 hours ago [-]
I love that Microsoft is committing a crime by continuing to let me use Win10
kersplody 3 hours ago [-]
Cool now let's exempt hobbyists from the 3-D printer must certify you are not printing gun parts pending legislation.
rgmerk 2 hours ago [-]
A quick search suggests that 3D-printed guns being used in crime is an actual, for-real, and growing problem.
I take it that you wouldn't be OK with somebody building a uranium enrichment facility in their backyard for their hobby reactor. So there is a line to be drawn on where people's freedom to tinker ends; it's just a question of where you draw it.
Personally, I think given there is an actual documented, non-isolated problem with 3D printed guns being used for violent crime, there's a debate to be had that's more sophisticated than "REGULATION BAD".
gmueckl 41 minutes ago [-]
Then I missed the public discussion on why making it illegal to possess DIY guns is not enough. Did that actually get debated or just handwaved away? By the time I became aware of this whole technical blocking thing, that was the only proposal on the table.
rfgplk 15 minutes ago [-]
> A quick search suggests that 3D-printed guns being used in crime is an actual, for-real, and growing problem.
Making actual firearms from steel is trivial. In fact you can look up Kalashnikov designs online and then replicate it with a relatively simple mill/lathe/tapping setup.
kotaKat 1 minutes ago [-]
Walk into Lowes and buy some steel pipe and a nail.
There's now much more of a debate that's to be more sophisticated than "3D PRINTED GUNS BAD".
tancop 2 hours ago [-]
My position on anything is "REGULATION BAD" when it's against individuals and non commercial/open source projects, "REGULATION GOOD" for massive corporations, and "REGULATION MAYBE GOOD NEEDS NUANCED DEBATE" for anything in between.
xyproto 1 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by regulation? Laws that could lead to a fine or jail time, or the enforcement of laws through ie. the police?
rgmerk 1 hours ago [-]
Non-commercial projects and individuals can do bad stuff too.
I agree the bar is a lot higher for those projects than massive corporations, but I think it's a pretty arguable case that "people are using 3D printers to make guns with features that would otherwise be illegal, and they are being used in crimes in some number" clears that bar.
1718627440 53 minutes ago [-]
Individuals can do a lot of bad stuff too? "Mark Zuckerberg" is still an individual.
lukeify 25 minutes ago [-]
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
crote 30 minutes ago [-]
Fully 3D-printed guns have awful performance, though. You would likely get significantly better results improvising with the stuff available at literally any random hardware store. Yet, despite that kind of gun being around for centuries, we weirdly aren't seeing bans on rigid metal tubes yet.
3D-printed "guns" become a real issue when you combine it with unregulated sale of firearm parts and ammunition. To get a fully-functional gun you just need to 3D print a fairly trivial component which is legally considered the entire gun as it carries the serial number. But that's not a 3D printing problem, because there are also companies selling that same part in a mostly-finished legally-not-a-gun form, together with a drilling jig guiding you how to drill the last few holes with a regular Dremel. And nobody is proposing banning Dremels. Heck, it is totally okay to own a lathe - which you can use to make your own high-quality guns!
And the entire discussion is of course pointless once you realize that this is the USA, so anyone is only a weekend road trip away from legally and fully-anonymously buying a gun two states over. If 3D-printed guns are such a huge problem, why aren't we seeing European countries mass-banning 3D printers?
To extend your analogy: it's like being fine with the sale of ultracentrifuges and uranium hexafluoride, then getting upset at someone selling a screwdriver to attach the plug to the power cord of the ultracentrifuge because "screwdrivers lead to nuclear bombs".
3D printed guns are a nothingburger. There is indeed a non-zero number of violent crimes committed with them - but there is also a non-zero number of violent crimes committed with shoelaces, so that's clearly not enough of a reason to ban them. It only makes sense to regulate them if they are involved in a significant number of crimes and leading to a huge increase in gun violence - and at that point you probably want to crack down on all forms of DIY guns instead of just the 3D printed ones. But that's simply not the case, so the regulation is pointless and doing more harm than good.
cityofdelusion 38 minutes ago [-]
3d printed guns are just a fancier pipe gun. Physics is the real enemy here. Make thing go fast out of tube is too simple of a design.
leni536 1 hours ago [-]
The problem may exist, but I don't believe that intrusive "gun part deyection" solves it.
crote 25 minutes ago [-]
The obvious answer is to slice up your gun model into a number of sub-parts which individually aren't detected by the algorithm but collectively still form a functioning gun. And there's an unlimited number of ways to slice up a model, so it is impossible to create an algorithm which catches everything.
What's next, keep track of all printed parts and invent the math to recombine them in every way possible to see if it could form a gun? Trivially defeated by using multiple printers. Hmmm, sounds like a good reason to force everyone to register their 3D printer with their real identity, and only allow a print after the model has been uploaded to the Federal Printing Database for verification...
phendrenad2 2 hours ago [-]
I'm starting to warm up to this law. So many loopholes. Nothing to worry about. I think California's incompetence has finally progressed from "proposes bad laws" to "proposes and botches the implementation of bad laws"
arjie 2 hours ago [-]
If you had an agent in the legislature wouldn’t you prefer exactly one of this form? My ideal representative is able to command support from diverse interests and subtly damages those opposed to me while subtly advantaging the principles I believe in - making compromises necessary to move incrementally to a state more aligned with what I wish it to be.
The reality is that many people want bad laws. Without the support of those people one does not get elected.
This use of people for power while de-facto disenfranchising them is pretty widespread already. For instance, some half of California and Texas are responsible for their strength in the electoral college while simultaneously being entirely disenfranchised when electing the President. Good technique.
gspr 2 hours ago [-]
Rest of the headline: "software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt"
And then further into the text it's clarified that there also isn't a specific list of open licenses, as the terrible headline would have you believe, but instead a description of what is considered open
With the caveat that I haven't read the actual legal text, this seems to be an eminently sensible law (it'd be better if it weren't needed, but here we are).
In summary: not a Linux exemption, and not an exemption for a specific list of licenses either.
catlikesshrimp 3 hours ago [-]
Can someone the exemption for browser extensions and other contained software?
My best guess is that the OS > Browser are reporting the age already, and the browser extensions will also use that "signal". Is this close enough?
" third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, which takes browser extension stores out of scope."
russellbeattie 1 hours ago [-]
Laws need to be managed like software: There should be a process for testing, user feedback, quick patches for bugs or conflicts, and regular updates to fix issues. If you think about it, both laws and software are called "code".
The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method. Lawmakers try to plan for everything, laws meant to solve one problem face feature creep and create a thousand others, then no one wants to touch anything after launch for fear of making things worse or because that one guy uses the temperature of his CPU as a quick-key and refuses to change his workflow.
Anyways, no law is perfect and never will be, and neither are the fixes.
zdc1 50 minutes ago [-]
Software development is slower in larger, more political organisations (hello Change Advisory Boards) and larger/older/sprawling codebases.
Most governments are huge, highly political, slow moving organisations. It seems to just come with the territory: slower rollout of changes, longer periods to observe the changes in the wild (throw in a few years to see how the law plays in legal cases/challenges), and suddenly you have fewer iterations to get it right.
1718627440 55 minutes ago [-]
> The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method.
It's not? It has been "agile" for centuries. It is constantly patched as someone wants to address some issue. It's rather rare for a completely new law to be written.
> Lawmakers try to plan for everything
It's not? They see one bug, e.g. children being exploited, now they tried it with a patch that is horribly broken and doesn't really work, so they patched it again, to remediate one issue, while they try to figure out more patches.
rfgplk 19 minutes ago [-]
It's also hilarious how poorly defined so many laws are. So many loopholes and bugs everywhere. Probably because most lawyers/politicians are effectively illiterate when it comes to logic.
Artoooooor 33 minutes ago [-]
Now do it with all open source licenses, not just the most popular.
anigbrowl 3 hours ago [-]
Weird how the people who habitually complain about government are conspicuously silent when it delivers something they wanted.
sbuttgereit 1 hours ago [-]
I habitually complain about government... so let me help you out with this.
The original issue with the law was never that those poor open source developers were going to have to bear the burden of complying with the law, but that the law itself was a bald-faced invasion of privacy by an overbearing troupe of people in power (i.e., government) so shit-sure of their superiority over the simple common folk they govern (i.e., you and me) that they aren't even embarrassed by their own arrogance.
I would suggest that what "we wanted" is no such law at all. What would be weird, and worthy of comment, is if those of us that complain about government were actually satisfied by an exemption which only applies to pretty damn tiny slice of the market. If anything, that wasn't a victory for privacy or common sense, but rather a concession that they had foolishly created a law that they wouldn't have been able to enforce as broadly as they thought they could get away with... or if they tried to enforce it they'd have to contend with the optics of the big hand of government yet again crushing individuals whose only real crime was their altruism rather than just some giant corporation.
So it isn't weird at all that "we're" silent. This isn't a win. Pointing out that the law had unintended consequences, including with Linux, et al., wasn't a statement of objective but rather a simple show that the law was rife with thoughtless unintended, or perhaps simply unspoken, consequences. The legislature's act here didn't restore privacy nor did it remove bad outcomes: if anything it now just raises questions about equal protection under law, at least on some practical level. It raises the question why some users of computers need such protections as age verification and others don't, and why the licensing terms of the OS are a valid proxy for that need... taking for granted that the stated purposes of the law are the real ones, of course.
missinglugnut 2 hours ago [-]
What do you want people to say? "Yay, the terrible law that threatened to make free computing illegal has an exemption for Linux. Now we only have to deal with unwanted mandatory age verification on all our non-linux devices. I'm so happy."
Frannky 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of people are not stupid. Age verification is a backdoor for control. I read and did not even bother to comment, it's like yay, that horrendous thing they were trying to do now it's not applied to everyone. I'm also sorry for California, such a beautiful place and full of wonderful people. I hope it will recover one day.
PowerElectronix 2 hours ago [-]
They shouldn't need to pass this if they didn't pass age verification at all.
This is not a good thing, it's a very small patch for a very bad thing.
throwawayqqq11 2 hours ago [-]
This is not wanted, its duct taping a bad idea even further and i half-wish MS/apple/co sue against it. This may cause lawmakers to bounce back in the wrong direction though.
edot 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is fantastic. Should be top of the page. I’m honestly shocked, I’ve fully internalized that everything is corrupt and beholden to big corporations. Somehow, a victory! Looks like the Linux Foundation and EFF pushed back, but they’re not exactly big. Good job, California lawmakers!
roenxi 2 hours ago [-]
> Good job, California lawmakers!
Is this serious or sarcasm? They passed a horrible law, now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce. So, you know. Why legislate it?
There isn't much of an angle here that reflects well on Californian lawmakers, they're still supporting this authoritarian trend of de-anonymisation and rolling back free communication on the internet. They're just going to come back for linux later once the idea of legally mandated PII on account registration is normalised. Although I do see this "In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law" so we seem to be entering a wild space where they're going to try and micromanage this in a weird way.
1718627440 59 minutes ago [-]
> now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce
Law is not an abstract code, but an incremental sometimes futile approach to shape society. They only want a way to hold big corporations accountable to exploiting children. They don't actually intend the effects on the consumer, so they tried to fix on easily changeable effect: "Don't worsen the privacy for people who want it." If you are using e.g. MS Windows, you have given up everything already. They do a lot of "telemetry" and for example everything you typed into MS Word is already licensed to Microsoft.
johnnyanmac 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
roenxi 47 minutes ago [-]
So what makes kid users on linux so special that they don't need nanny state protection? Are the Californian legislators just throwing them to the wolves? Or are the protections being put in place here not actually important?
Seriously, what is the message here supposed to be about the kids using linux? And why are they so different from kids using Windows or Mac? Are there other safety features we can exempt kid linux users from?
zoobab 3 hours ago [-]
Not a victory, Android is still covered.
qmarchi 3 hours ago [-]
Hard to argue that it's open source...
catlikesshrimp 3 hours ago [-]
Graphene should qualify. That would be a good incentive for kids to learn to root a mobile device and run graphene on it.
harvey9 2 hours ago [-]
I used the web based installer and it was so easy that we would be complaining the kids are not really learning anything by doing it!
gmueckl 38 minutes ago [-]
AOSP itself shouldn't be.
lmm 1 hours ago [-]
What a pointlessly provocative and unproductive thing to say.
carodgers 2 hours ago [-]
"Delivers something they wanted" is the most bizarre way possible to phrase "followed through with the majority of a reprehensible agenda and were forced to carve out an exception due to technical constraints and massive blowback."
jchw 1 hours ago [-]
When people pointed out the consequences this would have for open source, that did not mean what they wanted was an open source exemption. It was just meant to demonstrate just how poorly conceived the law is that nobody at any point even thought about this before it was signed in. Frankly the consequences for open source are not even at the forefront of concerns about what these rushed regulations will do to the world.
Pavilion2095 2 hours ago [-]
The age verification requirement wasn't dropped, what are you talking about? Linux getting an exemption isn't a win.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
It delivered an arbitrary exception to a stupid law. If all someone wanted was an exception for Linux, they don’t understand the problem with this law.
cwillu 2 hours ago [-]
“California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt”
colordrops 1 hours ago [-]
They didn't "deliver something we wanted". They decided NOT to fuck us over. I guess we should thank them for that?
squigz 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, this is very generous of them, and we should be thankful.
catlikesshrimp 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds more like they did their job well, not that they are generous.
ghssds 2 hours ago [-]
And now a bunch of OSI-Approved licenses get to have special rules applied to them, entrenching them and killing further innovation.
greyface- 2 hours ago [-]
The bill exempts:
> 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
which at least doesn't choose specific winners and losers among licenses. It does disfavor license-free and public domain software, which isn't great.
pritambaral 2 hours ago [-]
> It does disfavor license-free and public domain software, which isn't great.
Public domain software is free to "copy, redistribute, and modify", so ... where's the disfavour?
tancop 2 hours ago [-]
Technically you could argue that public domain works don't have license terms that make them free so the exception can't apply. Only an ignorant or ultra literalist judge would see it that way but you never know.
On the other hand a public domain dedication is a binding term that gives you permission (or license) to do what you want...
greyface- 2 hours ago [-]
It only applies to software distributed under a license. Public domain software isn't distributed under a license. It's in the public domain; no license is needed.
thorbutt 2 hours ago [-]
Can you name an OS that's licensed as public domain?
E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.
Or also BSD, ReactOS, hobby OS #24562 etc... ?
From TFA
> These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.
The article then explicitly cite "Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family".
There is also another exclusion for libraries and software from a packages managers like apt and pacman.
So from my understanding ReactOS, hobby OS but also CP/M, FreeDOS, Haiku or Collapse OS...
Where does MacOS and iOS fit then? The core of both those operating systems (darwin) is open source (APSL licensed).
I can copy and redistribute macOS binaries, and I can write programs/extensions that modify macOS.
These vague terms show that legislators are incapable of regulating software effectively; but they do create an enduring legal franchise to deal with their confusion.
> No Reverse Engineering. You may not, and you agree not to or enable others to, copy (except as expressly permitted by this License or by the Usage Rules if they are applicable to you), decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, attempt to derive the source code of, decrypt, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any services provided by the Apple Software or any part thereof (except as and only to the extent any foregoing restriction is prohibited by applicable law or by licensing terms governing use of Open-Sourced Components that may be included with the Apple Software).
From https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf
A project like PureDarwin, however, can be freely distributed because it omits Apple's proprietary parts.
This law describes as a true-false something that is not only true or false. This law is poorly written. Amending it didn’t fix that.
I take it that you wouldn't be OK with somebody building a uranium enrichment facility in their backyard for their hobby reactor. So there is a line to be drawn on where people's freedom to tinker ends; it's just a question of where you draw it.
Personally, I think given there is an actual documented, non-isolated problem with 3D printed guns being used for violent crime, there's a debate to be had that's more sophisticated than "REGULATION BAD".
Making actual firearms from steel is trivial. In fact you can look up Kalashnikov designs online and then replicate it with a relatively simple mill/lathe/tapping setup.
Congrats, you built a zipgun.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-63198715
There's now much more of a debate that's to be more sophisticated than "3D PRINTED GUNS BAD".
I agree the bar is a lot higher for those projects than massive corporations, but I think it's a pretty arguable case that "people are using 3D printers to make guns with features that would otherwise be illegal, and they are being used in crimes in some number" clears that bar.
3D-printed "guns" become a real issue when you combine it with unregulated sale of firearm parts and ammunition. To get a fully-functional gun you just need to 3D print a fairly trivial component which is legally considered the entire gun as it carries the serial number. But that's not a 3D printing problem, because there are also companies selling that same part in a mostly-finished legally-not-a-gun form, together with a drilling jig guiding you how to drill the last few holes with a regular Dremel. And nobody is proposing banning Dremels. Heck, it is totally okay to own a lathe - which you can use to make your own high-quality guns!
And the entire discussion is of course pointless once you realize that this is the USA, so anyone is only a weekend road trip away from legally and fully-anonymously buying a gun two states over. If 3D-printed guns are such a huge problem, why aren't we seeing European countries mass-banning 3D printers?
To extend your analogy: it's like being fine with the sale of ultracentrifuges and uranium hexafluoride, then getting upset at someone selling a screwdriver to attach the plug to the power cord of the ultracentrifuge because "screwdrivers lead to nuclear bombs".
3D printed guns are a nothingburger. There is indeed a non-zero number of violent crimes committed with them - but there is also a non-zero number of violent crimes committed with shoelaces, so that's clearly not enough of a reason to ban them. It only makes sense to regulate them if they are involved in a significant number of crimes and leading to a huge increase in gun violence - and at that point you probably want to crack down on all forms of DIY guns instead of just the 3D printed ones. But that's simply not the case, so the regulation is pointless and doing more harm than good.
What's next, keep track of all printed parts and invent the math to recombine them in every way possible to see if it could form a gun? Trivially defeated by using multiple printers. Hmmm, sounds like a good reason to force everyone to register their 3D printer with their real identity, and only allow a print after the model has been uploaded to the Federal Printing Database for verification...
The reality is that many people want bad laws. Without the support of those people one does not get elected.
This use of people for power while de-facto disenfranchising them is pretty widespread already. For instance, some half of California and Texas are responsible for their strength in the electoral college while simultaneously being entirely disenfranchised when electing the President. Good technique.
And then further into the text it's clarified that there also isn't a specific list of open licenses, as the terrible headline would have you believe, but instead a description of what is considered open
With the caveat that I haven't read the actual legal text, this seems to be an eminently sensible law (it'd be better if it weren't needed, but here we are).
In summary: not a Linux exemption, and not an exemption for a specific list of licenses either.
" third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, which takes browser extension stores out of scope."
The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method. Lawmakers try to plan for everything, laws meant to solve one problem face feature creep and create a thousand others, then no one wants to touch anything after launch for fear of making things worse or because that one guy uses the temperature of his CPU as a quick-key and refuses to change his workflow.
Anyways, no law is perfect and never will be, and neither are the fixes.
Most governments are huge, highly political, slow moving organisations. It seems to just come with the territory: slower rollout of changes, longer periods to observe the changes in the wild (throw in a few years to see how the law plays in legal cases/challenges), and suddenly you have fewer iterations to get it right.
It's not? It has been "agile" for centuries. It is constantly patched as someone wants to address some issue. It's rather rare for a completely new law to be written.
> Lawmakers try to plan for everything
It's not? They see one bug, e.g. children being exploited, now they tried it with a patch that is horribly broken and doesn't really work, so they patched it again, to remediate one issue, while they try to figure out more patches.
The original issue with the law was never that those poor open source developers were going to have to bear the burden of complying with the law, but that the law itself was a bald-faced invasion of privacy by an overbearing troupe of people in power (i.e., government) so shit-sure of their superiority over the simple common folk they govern (i.e., you and me) that they aren't even embarrassed by their own arrogance.
I would suggest that what "we wanted" is no such law at all. What would be weird, and worthy of comment, is if those of us that complain about government were actually satisfied by an exemption which only applies to pretty damn tiny slice of the market. If anything, that wasn't a victory for privacy or common sense, but rather a concession that they had foolishly created a law that they wouldn't have been able to enforce as broadly as they thought they could get away with... or if they tried to enforce it they'd have to contend with the optics of the big hand of government yet again crushing individuals whose only real crime was their altruism rather than just some giant corporation.
So it isn't weird at all that "we're" silent. This isn't a win. Pointing out that the law had unintended consequences, including with Linux, et al., wasn't a statement of objective but rather a simple show that the law was rife with thoughtless unintended, or perhaps simply unspoken, consequences. The legislature's act here didn't restore privacy nor did it remove bad outcomes: if anything it now just raises questions about equal protection under law, at least on some practical level. It raises the question why some users of computers need such protections as age verification and others don't, and why the licensing terms of the OS are a valid proxy for that need... taking for granted that the stated purposes of the law are the real ones, of course.
This is not a good thing, it's a very small patch for a very bad thing.
Is this serious or sarcasm? They passed a horrible law, now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce. So, you know. Why legislate it?
There isn't much of an angle here that reflects well on Californian lawmakers, they're still supporting this authoritarian trend of de-anonymisation and rolling back free communication on the internet. They're just going to come back for linux later once the idea of legally mandated PII on account registration is normalised. Although I do see this "In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law" so we seem to be entering a wild space where they're going to try and micromanage this in a weird way.
Law is not an abstract code, but an incremental sometimes futile approach to shape society. They only want a way to hold big corporations accountable to exploiting children. They don't actually intend the effects on the consumer, so they tried to fix on easily changeable effect: "Don't worsen the privacy for people who want it." If you are using e.g. MS Windows, you have given up everything already. They do a lot of "telemetry" and for example everything you typed into MS Word is already licensed to Microsoft.
Seriously, what is the message here supposed to be about the kids using linux? And why are they so different from kids using Windows or Mac? Are there other safety features we can exempt kid linux users from?
> 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
which at least doesn't choose specific winners and losers among licenses. It does disfavor license-free and public domain software, which isn't great.
Public domain software is free to "copy, redistribute, and modify", so ... where's the disfavour?
On the other hand a public domain dedication is a binding term that gives you permission (or license) to do what you want...
> software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt
Or is the idea that the Linux store is not allowed to sell cigarettes anymore?