California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

California’s legislature approved Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems—those licensed under GPL, MIT, BSD or Apache—from the Digital Age Assurance Act that will require age-verification data collection starting January 1 2027. The bill also narrows “operating system provider” and “application” definitions, bars unnecessary age-signal requests, and grants safe-harbor protection for inaccurate signals, while Windows, macOS, iOS and Android remain subject to the law.