California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

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And now a bunch of OSI-Approved licenses get to have special rules applied to them, entrenching them and killing further innovation.

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"

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.

AGPL…?

> the original definition of “user,” which read, “a child that is the primary user of a device,” and technically classified every device owner in California as a child.

which technically makes California a "Nanny state"

The fact that these bureaucrats think they have a right to add age-verification to information is ludicrous in the first place. This should be as much non-news as 'Lawmakers unanimously decide death is legal'.

Weird how the people who habitually complain about government are conspicuously silent when it delivers something they wanted.

This is funny to me, because if the age-verification laws were supposed to be a stepping stone toward greater oversight on computing so that AI can be corralled in the future, seeing what is likely to come with billions of spam-bots and zero traceability, then this single decision alone completely undermines it.