> Also, where does anything in the CA bill mandate age verification? It's saying the OS needs to prompt for age bracket info and allow the third party apps to query that. That is far different from verification.
Regardless of the technical details of the law(s), the devs are sensibly refusing to prompt for age on a fricking calculator.
Hopefully Linux distros get on board with this and announce non-CA/CO compliance as policy.
Ultimately, it does not matter. This legal notice is just theater, as anyone from CA or CO can still download, build and use the program. Linux distributions will just do the same.
Certainly. However, The developer seems to want to avoid the $2,500 per violation by any child who accesses the calculator, and might see a dick pic... because that calculator firmware does indeed allow for image viewing, and application development. It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.
> It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.
Sounds like a fun thought, but almost certainly untrue: https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm42
All new PCs sold in the late 1990s handedly beat these specifications. On CPU, storage, RAM, and display. The DM42 firmly remains an embedded system that's just enough for the calculator software and not much more.
If you want to take it back to the early 1980s, you start reaching the claim being true.
You might say the bills themselves are theater. Respond to theater with theater.
Well, no, that's not how laws like this work. Of course people in these states can just install the software and it is very likely nothing more will come from that unless some politico in one of these states decides she has a beef against the company, group or person which distributes the software. When that happens she'll have this law at hand to whack them with because the knowingly violated state law so they need to be dealt with, won't anyone think of the children?.
For Linux it will be way more problematic because:
- A lot of of corporate contributions comes from SV.
- Linux Foundation is incorporated in CA.
- Linus himself is CA's resident AFAIR.
So there is zero chance of claiming no jurisdiction. The only hope is whoever is enforcing this batshit wouldn't go after what is essentially not an OS for the purpose of the bill, but rather an internal component (it would be like going after a vendor of bolts and nuts for noncompliance of a toaster).
It's more likely to be an issue for distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.
Although, if I'm understanding this correctly, I think all they would have to do to comply is have something during installation that asks for the age category, and write a file that is world readable, but only writable by root that contains that category that applications can read.
That is already way too much as far as I'm concerned. It's not that it's difficult, it's that it's arbitrary and a form of commanded speech or action. Smallness and easiness isn't an excuse.
If you write a story, there must be a character in it somewhere that reminds kids not to smoke. That's all. It's very easy.
I actually don't mind mandating the market take reasonable actions. The EU mandating USB C was an excellent move that materially improved things.
However I think mandated actions should to the greatest extent possible be minimal, privacy preserving, and have an unambiguous goal that is clearly accomplished. This legislation fails in that regard because it mandates sharing personal information with third parties where it could have instead mandated queries that are strictly local to the device.
Under no circumstances should we be “mandating” how hobbyists write their software. If you want to scope this to commercial OSes, be my guest. That’s not what was done here.
I'm not sure where the line between "hobby" and "professional" lies when it comes to linux distributions. Many of them are nonprofit but not really hobbyist at this point. Debian sure feels like a professional product to me (I daily drive it).
We regulate how a hobbyist constructs and uses a radio. We regulate how a hobbyist constructs a shed in his yard or makes modifications to the electrical wiring in his house.
I think mandating the implementation of strictly device local filtering based on a standardized HTTP header (or in the case of apps an attached metadata field) would be reasonably non-invasive and of benefit to society (similar to mandating USB C).
And then another state will pass a law mandating scanning of all local images, and another state will want automated scanning of text, and a different country will want a backdoor for law enforcement. We have to stop this here and now.
I believe Linus lives in Oregon.
I think Linus Torvalds lives in Oregon.
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Stop spreading disinformation. Linus and others did most of the work in the kernel. GNU project on the kernel side was architecture astronaut vaporware aka "Hurd". They were much more successful in userland (coreutils, gcc and the toolchain, gdb, Emacs, to name a few).
I meant the userland specifically. By calling what is fundamentally a GNU system running on a different kernel just "linux" it makes people think linux and his crew made all of the userland, in part because saying a college student made "an entire operating system" is far more profitable for news agencies than acknowledging his important but overall relatively small role in what they call "linux"
Because the kernel is the irreplaceable piece. None of what GNU did is: there are numerous implementations of coreutils and shells and at least one non-GNU production-quality compiler toolchain (clang-llvm), a few alternative libcs. And many distribution do actively use the non-GNU parts. But none of this is useful without the kernel that is compatible with computers people have. And the only usable kernel we have is Linux (while BSDs are out there too, they take a much different tightly-integrated approach to userspace).
To add to this: I can appreciate the significance of GNU, especially in early Linux distributions, but the position of "GNU was the real OS, Linux was just the kernel" is also deceptive, IMO.
Sure, a lot of the userspace was GNU, but a lot of it ... wasn't. Things like PAM, the init system, and the network config tools, off the top of my head. A lot of system-specific tools come from "not-GNU", too.
You can't discount how much of early Linux was "GNU", and how big a deal GCC and GNU libc (and the rest!) were, but it's disingenuous in my opinion to call GNU an "operating system" that you just plugged Linux, the kernel, into. Even today, as far as I can tell, there is still not a true GNU system. Guix comes close, in terms of being "GNU-ish", but the most usable Hurd distro (AFAIK!) is Debian, where, again, a lot of components come from Debian, rather than GNU.
And, as you say, modern systems have drifted even further from being GNU. They have lots of GNU components, but so did, say, the Sprite OS, or a lot of 4.4BSD derivatives.