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An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/stallmanwasright@programming.dev
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[–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I mean the definition is:

(g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

Note the three verbs there: "develops, licenses, or controls". Now the ideology of free software, of course, holds that the person or entity that "controls" the operating system software ought to be the device owner, so that one is arguably inapplicable to free software.

But "develops" means "write the source code", and "licenses" can mean "put under a free software license". I don't see how I can argue legally that if I'm developing an experimental OS in my own git repo, putting that under an MIT license, and someone in California then installs it on their computer, I am not the person that developed and licensed it. Will any foreigner who did that now be arrested when they enter the US?

If they had to at all, they should have written that law to apply only to operating systems that are preinstalled on devices sold in California. That would have been in the realm of product regulation that only manufacturers and vendors of computers in California have to ever care about. If some FOSS operating systems then do implement it so they can be sold preinstalled in California, there's nothing harmful about that.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Ok, first off, I agree that limiting it to the OS that comes preinstalled on a computer would be a much less ambiguous way to write it. However, I think they're actually trying to prevent more egregious means of age verification by saying "if you get this signal, you will use it, you will not use anything else, and if you stick to that you're in the clear", so having it apply to all operating systems actually helps.

    The crux if the matter then is what is an operating system, who is the developer, and what does it mean to licence it? In your example you talk about publishing your code in a git repository. Whilst there doesn't seem to be any language in the bill clarifying this, and I am, very much, not a lawyer, it seems to me that there us a difference between publishing source code that can be compiled into an operating system, and publishing an operating system. You cannot just load the source onto a machine an have it run, you need to compile it and build it into a usable image first. From that I would say that the operating system is the compiled artefact, and so the developer and licensor of that is whoever built the image, and the controller is obviously the person who put it on the machine.

    That would mean that you are free to publish the code, and only those who package it (likely either the end user or a company that sells OSs) would have to concern themselves with implementing the user age bracket flag.

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