Carl Richell, the founder of System76, has shared that Colorado’s Age Attestation Bill (SB26-051) is set to be amended to exclude open source software from its requirements.
The proposed amendment would exclude open source operating systems and apps, code repositories like GitHub and GitLab, and containers like Docker and Podman.
We covered this bill back in February, when it made no such distinction. Carl has been working directly with Colorado Senator Matt Ball, the bill’s co-author, to push for these exclusions since then, and it looks like his efforts are paying off.
Not sure if this is a pyrric victory. If every (commercial) app, every website, every… requests age verification and Linux doesn’t provide it, there a huge downside to using it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating FOR age verification, I get that there are cases where it just doesn’t make sense (e.g. Podman/Docker, Code,…) but I fear that this victory may be a bitter one and we need to keep fighting.