Resistance to operating system age checks coming from *checks notes* open source calculator and an OS that may just exclude Californians altogether

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...