Open Source · California · US Senate · Tom's Hardware
AB 1856 doesn’t explicitly say that repos aren’t app stores
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The amendments to AB 1856 also remove the original definition of “user,” which read, “a child that is the primary user of a device,” and technically classified every device owner in California as a child.
Key facts
- California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1
- The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day
- A later July 1, 2027, deadline applies to devices set up before January 1
- Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who wrote both the Digital Age Assurance Act and the AB 1856 amendment, introduced the exemption back in February following criticism from Linux developers
Summary
California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope. A second exclusion removes software components that aren’t “offered to consumers as a stand-alone executable application through a covered application store” from the law’s definition of an application, covering libraries and dependencies distributed through package managers like apt and pacman.
In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law.