Linux Is Too Powerful For Age Check Laws

California and Colorado were pushing laws requiring operating systems to collect and expose user age brackets via APIs for child safety purposes. The legislation would have forced Linux distros to implement mandatory age collection at install/first boot — a near-impossible task given Linux's decentralized nature with no single company, account system, or app store. After pushback from the open source community, both states amended their bills to carve out free and open source software: any OS distributed under licenses allowing users to copy, redistribute, and modify the software (including installing modified versions without platform restrictions) is exempt. Code repositories like GitHub and container registries are also excluded from the 'app store' definition. Android and SteamOS remain in a gray area due to their proprietary wrappers and locked bootloaders. The author frames this as a victory for software freedom, arguing that the ungovernable nature of FOSS — where users can strip out any compliance code and redistribute freely — ultimately forced lawmakers to back down.