California's legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the state's Digital Age Assurance Act, which takes effect January 1, 2027.
The Senate amended the bill on August 21 and passed it 39-0 on August 26. The Assembly concurred the following day.
The exemption resolves nearly a year of uncertainty over whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup—a requirement that would have applied to Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.
The amendments redefine "operating system provider" to exclude entities distributing software under licenses permitting recipients to copy, redistribute and modify the code. GPL, MIT, BSD and Apache licenses qualify. This removes major distributions including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and the BSD family from the age data collection mandate. Proprietary systems from Microsoft, Apple and Google remain subject to the requirements.
Two additional carve-outs exclude software components not offered to consumers as stand-alone applications through covered stores—protecting libraries and dependencies distributed via package managers like apt and pacman—and storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons running only inside host applications, effectively exempting browser extension stores.
The bill now goes to Governor Gavin Newsom for signature. He signed the original Digital Age Assurance Act in October.
The exemption creates a compliance split: open-source distributors avoid age verification infrastructure costs while proprietary vendors must allocate resources to meet the mandate. This differential could shape development priorities and adoption patterns based on compliance burden.
