System76 fighting for open source being excluded from Colorado age checks

There's a lot of age checking / age assurance bills going around right now, and System76 have entered the fight in Colorado to help open source.

I've recently written about the one in California, with Ubuntu and Fedora developers commenting on the situation, and how more US states are looking at doing it or already have it coming in. System76 are now throwing their hat in the ring, going directly to the source and starting the fight back.

As posted on Bluesky and Mastodon, System76 founder Carl Richell posted:

Today, I met with Colorado Senator Matt Ball, co-author of Colorado OS Age Attestation Bill SB26-051.

Sen. Ball suggested excluding open source software from the bill. This appears to be a real possibility.

Amendments are expected for the CA age attestation bill. It's my hope we can move fast enough to influence excluding open source in the CA bill amendments.

No illusions, it's an uphill battle, but we have an open door to advocate for the open source community.

Why Colorado specifically? That's where System76 are based, in Denver, Colorado USA. So it makes sense for them to be jumping in directly there.

Hopefully other Linux vendors will also be jumping in on this, as it seems to have caught the open source community quite off-guard which is unfortunate.