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California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

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Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#11
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a victory, Android is still covered.

Hard to argue that it's open source...

Graphene should qualify. That would be a good incentive for kids to learn to root a mobile device and run graphene on it.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#12
post #8

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

Indeed, this is very generous of them, and we should be thankful.

Sounds more like they did their job well, not that they are generous.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#13

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

What do you want people to say? "Yay, the terrible law that threatened to make free computing illegal has an exemption for Linux. Now we only have to deal with unwanted mandatory age verification on all our non-linux devices. I'm so happy."

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#14

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

It delivered an arbitrary exception to a stupid law. If all someone wanted was an exception for Linux, they don’t understand the problem with this law.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#16

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

The age verification requirement wasn't dropped, what are you talking about? Linux getting an exemption isn't a win.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#18

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

This is not wanted, its duct taping a bad idea even further and i half-wish MS/apple/co sue against it. This may cause lawmakers to bounce back in the wrong direction though.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#19
post #15

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

The bill exempts:

> a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software

which at least doesn't choose specific winners and losers among licenses. It does disfavor license-free and public domain software, which isn't great.

Re: California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

#20
Rest of the headline: "software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt"

And then further into the text it's clarified that there also isn't a specific list of open licenses, as the terrible headline would have you believe, but instead a description of what is considered open

With the caveat that I haven't read the actual legal text, this seems to be an eminently sensible law (it'd be better if it weren't needed, but here we are).

In summary: not a Linux exemption, and not an exemption for a specific list of licenses either.

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