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PayPalThere'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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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You can also find comments for this article on social media: 
Quoting: KandarihuI don't think that this is the right approach. As much as I want Linux to grow as a platform, this gives us an unfair advantage. The better choice will be to scrap/abolish such legislation entirely.On the other hand, pointing out the flaws in the legislation in the process of requesting exclusions weakens the arguments for the rest of the bill to move forward as well — and should it fail to stop it completely, I’d rather free software be excluded from it than not.
As soon as Californians are no longer able to legally run Linux, their own citizens will go after this law and end the moronic political overreach.
Quoting: KandarihuAs much as I want Linux to grow as a platform, this gives us an unfair advantage.You think this gives Linux an unfair advantage? I suppose the fair version of this is asking for it to be completely scrapped knowing that it would be unlikely for them to listen.
Plus we are already asking for that. o_o
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