A small set of people are merging changes to various Linux components to make sure every application knows your birth date.
This is being done rapidly by people with questionable justifications and being merged with no youth and few marginalized people involved.
@artemis @wwahammy this isn't complying in advance, it's complying with the law. Which passed unanimously through the California assembly and senate and was signed into law by Gavin Newsom in 2025. It's not going to be repealed.
Open source projects do not have the type of budget that allows them to merely ignore the law and shrug off fines and legal fees.
@ShadSterling @artemis @smn while understandable, that's not a good solution. I don't think we should trade one freedom away for another.
The whole thing needs to be stopped. Period. No compromise, no surrender.
@wwahammy @artemis @smn it does, but I don’t think that license change is meant to be a whole solution, and I’m not sure what better thing those orgs could do.
Until it is stopped, maybe it would be better if the ones not located in California just ignored it; it’s not like they can impose California law on the entire world
@ShadSterling @wwahammy @artemis @smn I actually think that the license change and/or a website note saying "don't download this if you're in $jurisdiction" is an excellent response.
It's not like CA or the UK or Brazil can actually police who downloads what OS, and it removes legal liability* from the distro without actually affecting access or changing the code to support surveillance. The distros *do* need a way to avoid legal liability.
If in the end this leads to a situation where most Linuxes are officially banned in most of the world but people routinely ignore that ban, that's a good thing actually because it trains people to ignore bad laws. If some jurisdictions escalate to more invasive measures that target users, that's where you'll actually find a political base to resist this.
* I'm not a lawyer, but I have seen decent-sized orgs go this route.
@tiotasram @ShadSterling @artemis @smn I think the warning on downloads is perfectly fine but let's step back for a second: which distros need to avoid liability?
Most distros likely don't, they have no assets or there's no organization to actually sue. A few distros have some assets but why would the AG ever consider suing them? And how would they prove the number of negligent violations? There's no centralized record of users.
Are there companies who might be at risk? Valve seems the most likely but the Steam Deck is a gaming platform in millions of houses. That's worth suing over. But why would they sue Canonical over Ubuntu? Are there even 100k kids in all of California using Ubuntu? I doubt it.
@wwahammy @ShadSterling @artemis @smn agree with your logic but sadly logic is often not relevant when it comes to bureaucracy.
To put it another way: a vindictive suit designed to take down a distro web server could happen merely because some silicon valley VC got mad (or bored) and decided to drop $100k on an AG race somewhere?
There are innumerable bad reasons for a suit to arise that could absolutely happen, and being "technically in compliance due to disclaimer" probably heads off some number of these. The "don't download if you're in CA" language has other upsides too, like getting a broad group of users pissed at the law and priming them for non-compliance, and setting a standard for your community that you'll stand up to bad laws by refusing compliance.
@ShadSterling @wwahammy @artemis @smn
For the Polish example, I probably wouldn't worry about it. For the Portland example, I might. If it's a US entity, and/or servers that host it are in the US, I imagine a "don't distribute OSes in CA law could be applied. Otherwise how does the law have any effect on Microsoft, which is also not headquartered or incorporated in CA? Possibly the mechanism is "sales to entities registered in CA" which indeed Linuxes don't have (well, Red Hat might, but I don't care about their ilk). But certainly the framework for cross-border prosecution is there. I'm not a lawyer, and I think asking an actual lawyer is the right thing to do if you suspect litigation might be possible. I think I saw in another thread someone say that at least one distro has done exactly that and said they aren't making any changes, so perhaps that's a good approach for some.
Eric Schultz
Artemysia
Justin Fitzsimmons
ShadSterling
Tiota Sram