Resistance to operating system age checks coming from *checks notes* open source calculator and an OS that may just exclude Californians altogether
Publish Date: 2026-03-04 08:45:00
Source Domain: www.pcgamer.com
California has adopted a bill that requires operating systems to ask for a user’s age or date of birth during setup. The bill, which will become enforced legislation from January 1, 2027, says an OS should use this to determine the availability of applications in a storefront and share this information with any developer that requests it in real-time. All of which sounds incompatible with many of today’s open source software, including Linux—so what are they to do?
Jef Spaleta, project leader for popular Linux distribution, Fedora, has said they are still trying to get to grips with the legislation and what it requires. However, in their measured response, they have noted that age information may need to be tied to account creation and that information stored in a file somewhere easily accessible to applications.
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“No telemetry… just a way for applications to query the OS… a local API… sounds a lot like a dbus service to me,” Spaleta says.
