[iamnothere]

> Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification.

Regardless of the technical details of the law(s), the devs are sensibly refusing to prompt for age on a fricking calculator.

Hopefully Linux distros get on board with this and announce non-CA/CO compliance as policy.

[drnick1]

Ultimately, it does not matter. This legal notice is just theater, as anyone from CA or CO can still download, build and use the program. Linux distributions will just do the same.

[parasense]

Certainly. However, The developer seems to want to avoid the $2,500 per violation by any child who accesses the calculator, and might see a dick pic... because that calculator firmware does indeed allow for image viewing, and application development. It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.

[goda90]

You might say the bills themselves are theater. Respond to theater with theater.

[hagbard_c]

Well, no, that's not how laws like this work. Of course people in these states can just install the software and it is very likely nothing more will come from that unless some politico in one of these states decides she has a beef against the company, group or person which distributes the software. When that happens she'll have this law at hand to whack them with because the knowingly violated state law so they need to be dealt with, won't anyone think of the children?.

[tliltocatl]

For Linux it will be way more problematic because:

- A lot of of corporate contributions comes from SV.

- Linux Foundation is incorporated in CA.

- Linus himself is CA's resident AFAIR.

So there is zero chance of claiming no jurisdiction. The only hope is whoever is enforcing this batshit wouldn't go after what is essentially not an OS for the purpose of the bill, but rather an internal component (it would be like going after a vendor of bolts and nuts for noncompliance of a toaster).

[thayne]

It's more likely to be an issue for distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.

Although, if I'm understanding this correctly, I think all they would have to do to comply is have something during installation that asks for the age category, and write a file that is world readable, but only writable by root that contains that category that applications can read.

[helterskelter]

I believe Linus lives in Oregon.

[fsckboy]

"Linux" is just the source code to the kernel, pure free speech, and it can't run by itself in order to ask anybody anything. Underage programmers will benefit from the education of reading it.

[pkaye]

I think Linus Torvalds lives in Oregon.