Amid the controversy surrounding age verification bills set to take effect in California and Colorado,Open source operating systems have finally received an important exemption in the latest legislative text, but hybrids like SteamOS, which are sandwiched between open source systems and closed app stores, are still likely to need to perform age verification on users.
According to reports, System76 CEO Carl Richell has previously met with multiple lawmakers to push for an exemption that would allow open source operating systems such as Linux to not integrate mandatory age verification mechanisms at the system level. Following his initiative and continued pressure from related groups, the newly finalized text of Section 30 of Colorado Senate Bill 26-051 explicitly added an exclusion clause for the open source software licensing model.
The clause states that this clause does not apply to operating system or application providers and developers whose software is released under a set of license terms that allow recipients to copy, redistribute, and modify the software and install all modified versions without platform restrictions imposed by the provider or developer at a technical or contractual level. In short, as long as the operating system or application complies with this type of typical free and open source software license, and no platform party enforces control over the modified versions that users install, it is not covered by the Colorado Age Verification Act.
California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1856) also introduced similar language in recent revisions, also providing space for open source operating systems at the legal level. A recent amendment to the bill states that "operating system provider" does not include a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit recipients to copy, redistribute, and modify the software. Compared with Colorado's approach, the California legislation is more direct in its definition, excluding qualified open source developers as a whole from the legal definition of "operating system providers," thereby fundamentally excluding them from the applicable objects of the regulations.
For most Linux distributions, this means that in the future, users in California and Colorado will generally not need to submit age information to the system level as required by the law when using these systems. The obligation to enforce age verification can be bypassed as long as the distribution maintains the typical open source license and freedom to modify and redistribute it. This is seen as an important milestone for the open source community, which has long emphasized user privacy and transparency.
However, the situation is more complicated for systems using dual licensing or hybrid models, the most representative of which is Valve's SteamOS. From a basic level, SteamOS is still based on Arch Linux, and its underlying system components follow an open source license and can theoretically enjoy the above exemptions. However, the Steam client, which is the core of the system, is itself a proprietary software app store. Under the existing legal framework, it is likely to be regarded as a subject that needs to collect and process age data.
This leads to a layered implementation situation: the operating system level (Arch Linux) can be exempted in California and Colorado and does not have to be forced to integrate the age verification mechanism; but the Steam client running on it, as a content distribution platform, still faces the obligation to verify the user's age according to local regulations. For end users, this layered difference might look like this in practice: the system itself does not require any proof of age, but when using the Steam client to access the store and game content, age-related information or some form of age verification process is still required.
What’s more noteworthy is that the California bill does not set up similar open source exceptions in the browser field, which means that browsers under open source or similar licensing models may also need to interface with the operating system’s age authentication signal. The report pointed out that there is currently no exemption statement for open source browsers such as Firefox and Chromium in the public text of AB 1856. These browsers may theoretically need to have built-in capabilities to obtain "age attestation signals" from the operating system in order to fulfill compliance obligations when accessing restricted content or services.
From a technical implementation perspective, this may require browser manufacturers to introduce a new set of interface standards in the future for requesting and processing age information from operating systems or platforms, and to adapt between different jurisdictions and implementation modes. For browsers marked by privacy protection, this will be a challenge at both the engineering and compliance levels. They must reduce data collection as much as possible while meeting the rigid requirements of local legislation for the protection of minors.
Overall, California and Colorado have alleviated some developers and users' concerns about "mandatory age verification mechanisms threatening privacy and freedom" by granting exemptions to open source software at the operating system level. However, at the application layer, especially in the field of commercial content platforms and browsers, the relevant enforcement mechanisms are still strict, and may gradually expand into universal industry standards. For a hybrid ecosystem like SteamOS, this means retaining its open source foundation while still fulfilling full age verification obligations on the core content platform to continue operating legally in a future regulatory environment.