Gaming: Resistance To Operating System Age Checks Coming From *checks...

Open source operating systems are wrestling with how to comply with age-checking bills.

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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, Fedora, has said they are still trying to get to grips with the legislation and what it requires. However, in their measured response, they have noted that age information may need to be tied to account creation and that information stored in a file somewhere easily accessible to applications.

"End of the day.. this might be as simple as extending how we currently map uid to usernames and group membership and having a new file in /etc/ that keeps up with age," Spaleta says in a discussion over at the Fedora Project.

"It might be as simple as that and we extend the administrative cli and gui tools to populate that file as part of account creation. That might be simplest and it solves the problem for the full ecosystem of Linux OSes. Then applications just have to start choosing to look at the file."

"No telemetry… just a way for applications to query the OS… a local API… sounds a lot like a dbus service to me," Spaleta says.

A D-Bus service (allowing for communication between programs) is also suggested by another developer on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.

A reply to that thread is someone suggesting the law is completely unenforceable, so there's definitely going to be some back and forth on any potential compliance here.

There is another valid response: simply reject users from California. Or, at least, nominally do as such. That's what the developers of the MidnightBSD OS have suggested they'll be doing, by excluding residents of California from using the OS from January 1, 2027—the same day the bill becomes active in the state.

Source: PC Gamer