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 I don't know why.
And I'd say "why are people complying at all?".
@feonixrift @dalias @wwahammy @artemis It's not complying "in advance". The California thing is *law* now. Sure, other jurisdictions are in progress, but the time between now and the next Linux distribution releases before the January 1, 2027 date isn't that long.
Everyone in the different community spaces that *do the work* are scrambling because being out of compliance is ludicrously expensive and there's not much time to be prepared. Even so, there *are* public discussions with patch review.
@neal @feonixrift @dalias @wwahammy @artemis I stated on the xdg mailing list that amendments are expected. We are working with Colorado legislators on language that would exclude effectively all open source operating systems and all embedded/server operating systems. This has a chance of making it to the California bill before it is effective.
I had a chance to demand polkit access controls be implemented on the accountsservice change but the systemd userdb change did not get that implemented.
It's good that someone is doing that. IBM seriously dropped the ball when it came to lobbying about this, given how it affects #RedHat. No-one even brought up the implications for #Unix-like operating systems in #California.
You're not the first person to talk about amending the California Bill. It's an Act now, not a Bill, though. It's nigh on impossible to supersede it before 2027-01-01.
The politics, as well as the physical realities of how long it takes to enact legislation, mean that there just isn't the time, even if the will could be drummed up.
The current Act took 8 months to pass, itself, and not only is there no-one in California really lobbying to fix this, there's also the political problem of seeming to want to carve a massive exemption in a law that only months ago passed through every stage in the legislature with zero 'no' votes.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116175882841550437
@neal @feonixrift @dalias @wwahammy @artemis
#CaliforniaLaw #USLaw #FreeSoftware #AgeVerification
Actually, it doesn't.
But the legislative record does. The California legislature has detailed accounts of what was brought up, pro and con, in committee.
It shows that the only 'free' things that the objectors thought about, the only things recorded as formal objections by concerned parties, were gratis applications on Microsoft/Google/Apple App Stores, and a supposed effect on their development costs.
No-one mentioned the #Unix model of user accounts or the BSD/Linux-based/Illumos-based operating system models of application packaging.
That said, it really was up to someone like IBM to spot this and lobby at the very least for #RedHat and RPMs to be taken into consideration in the definitions of 'covered application store' and whatnot.
@soller @neal @feonixrift @wwahammy @artemis
#CaliforniaLaw #USLaw #AgeVerification
Eric Schultz
Artemysia
Cassandrich
d.rift
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) 
Jeremy Soller 🦀
JdeBP
ben