It does sound impossible, but it would likely shift the liability to the person creating the user accounts. Right now I am just hoping something simple is implemented so that SbK can continue.
Well, I could of course be grossly wrong, but I strongly suspect that Free & Open Source multi-user operating systems like GNU/Linux and other UNIX-family systems would be exempt from the proposed legislation, simply because they do not constitute the definition of an operating system as conceived by a couple of tech-unsavvy politicians whose only understanding of the term is confined to macOS, iOS, Android and MS-Windows — or otherwise put, proprietary single-user devices.
Sadly it is no longer “proposed legislation”. Governor Newsom signed it into law in California. The effective date is Jan of 2027, so that gives a little time. But I have read the law, and while not a lawyer I have learned to read legal documents because of the SCO lawsuits and a site called Groklaw. The law is so vague you could likely apply it to any operating system. App store is also loosely defined so that package managers also likely are included..
Ha! Fellow former follower on Groklaw of the two-decades-long battle of SCO against IBM and Novell here. 
If it’s that vague, then the opposite is true as well, i.e. that exemptions can easily be conceived.
Furthermore, over here in Europe, when a government signs a law into effect which the people cannot accept, then the people will strike and take to the streets until the government backs down again. It’s happening all the time. Power of the people, and all that.
And with such a powerful tech lobby as in the USA, I’m sure some sort of similar action wouldn’t be out of reach either. 
Addendum: As an example, as I gather, they describe an operating system as having an app store. Well, that already limits it to operating systems in which one cannot (legally) install software from outside of the app store.
By definition, this then precludes GNU/Linux, because we don’t have any app stores — we’ve got repositories, and it is perfectly possible (and legal) to install software through other means than by way of the built-in package manager.
Furthermore, the software is (mostly) Free & Open Source, which means that we have the legal right to modify the software we install — before or after installation.
Yes the tech lobby is powerful, but that also includes a lot of bad actors like Microsoft that would love to have this law kill linux.
I also wouldnt hold my breath waiting for protests to a “save the kids” law. Besides with the insanity of our federal government at the moment there are a lof of other unrelated battles swallowing the air for such actions.
They’ve tried that, under Steve Ballmer, with a lobby group comprising several Republican senators. And they failed.
The Free & Open Source licenses are all legally valid and enforceable in a court of law, and said Californian/Coloradan law is in violation of the validity of these licenses.
In other words, this matter is actionable in court.
That… is another matter, of course. 
I think you’re wrong on that, and at least one linux distro/project has said as much (I think there’s a link somewhere above).
MacOS and Windows aren’t single user, at least windows isn’t. Not sure why you think that it would matter anyway - it would be part of creating an account.
We need a way to fight the US and UK etc when they come up with stupid nonsense like this. ATM we’re just buggered.
A better idea would be to have websites and apps send signals to web browsers and the OS, and have the those decide what to do about it. Instead of just age ranges we should have content specifiers.
Ideally we’d have a new type of account a “child account” that allows such restrictions to be configured and enforced. We’d also have to educate the parents so they can use the tools.
This removes the need for privileged information to be sent to random people, and actually blocks children from accessing things. It also negates the “need” for age verification on at least some websites.
However the governments won’t like it - it would be too effective and doesn’t pave the way for mass surveillance and control. Also puts the technical (and potentially financial) debt where it needs to be (larger organisations), and doesn’t limit software development to large companies.
Probably not enough knowledgable people for that to happen in an effective way. It definitely won’t happen in the UK.
We’d need to convince at least a quarter (probably half or more) of the population in each country that there’s a better way.
That’s not the way they’ll see it.
Repos were the inspiration for app stores, they’re way too close so they will be considered app stores (just that the products are free).
That’s why they want this system in every app.
I’m surprised to hear you say that. If anything, the genuine multi-user functionality in Windows — i.e. being able to have multiple distinct users use the system simultaneously — was not created by Microsoft. It was a (very ugly) NT kernel hack by Citrix Systems, which Microsoft then bought from them, and it’s still only included in the server editions of Windows.
macOS on the other hand has already been a UNIX system since OSX Leopard — a weirdly perverted UNIX system, but a UNIX system nevertheless — and therefore it is a genuine multi-user system.
Nevertheless, both are commercial and proprietary operating systems generally intended to be used with only one user account, regardless of how many people within one’s household use that very same account. This is why the segregation of user privileges — including but not limited to parental supervision — is commonly implemented at the level of web browsers, via so-called browser profiles.
GNU/Linux isn’t even being offered as a complete operating system by its respective developers, because they only develop individual components and offer those as source code only. Distributions then take that source code — which, remember, they did not create themselves — and build it into binary code, and offer it up for download and installation.
Considering the ambiguity and short-sightedness of this political decision, it is actionable in court, and can thus be overruled by a judge. That’s my whole point.
Judges overrule even the president of the USA all the time now, even though they have in the past probably never have needed to do so as regularly as today. And the same is possible in the UK, or for that matter, anywhere else in Europe — geographically, the UK is still part of Europe, even though politically it is not part of the EU anymore.
It’s not a matter of possible versus impossible. It’s a matter of acquiescing and bending over, versus using the legal system against irrational decisions made by incompetent politicians.
P.S.: And of course, we all know that people never lie about their age, don’t we? 
But the politicians don’t care, it has accounts and that’s all that will matter.
Hopefully, but I think I may have less faith in the system than you.
Yes and then the rulings are ignored.
Until the stupid half of the country wakes up, the orange Putin wannabe can essentially do whatever he wants. AFAIK there’s too much fear of a civil war (or at least riots). It might actually take a civil war to get rid of the sod, however I think he’ll back off if enough of the population stands up.
There needs to be enough people/organisations that can afford it and will try.
Perhaps I’ve watched too much sci-fi (or not spent enough time in Europe), but I really have no confidence in any company, government or legal system any more.
Indeed. 
Unfortunately that’s how we know there’s definitely going to be worse coming in the future. This step is just paving the way.
Only because there was a legal backdoor to do so. And that legal backdoor is going to come slamming back at his face in the very near future.
Hey, elect a clown, expect a circus.
Over here in Europe, we have two very important and sacred principles…
- Separation of church and state.
- Separation of powers. The legislative branch, the executive branch and the judicial branch are all independent from one another and may not influence one another. Governments have fallen over that already in the past.
We’ve recently also made that very clear to the US ambassador here in Belgium when he was pressuring the government to intervene in a legal proceeding. He didn’t quite like that.
Remember how long the SCO nonsense went on? Are you comfortable having Linux distributions fined $2,500 for non willful infractions, or $7,500 if they are found to be willfully disregarding the law while this works its way through the courts and then appeals?? Guaranteed a second charge will be considered willful.
How long do you expect a distribution to survive considering most are run on shoestring budgets?
I dont expect instant action, but the debating phase shouldnt last forever. At least something needs to be in place, no matter how flawed it might be for Jan 2027. Waiting till the last second isnt a good idea.
That’s exactly why distributions with a registered presence within said jurisdictions should take the matter to court now.
I would consider every distribution that can be downloaded by someone in California to have a “presence” that could see them fined by this law.
Geo-block those states from downloading?
No, that’s a logical fallacy. A legal presence is coupled to a legal address within said jurisdiction. An office, if you will.
Manjaro contains software from literally all over the globe — or for the Flat-Earthers, all over the, um, platter — and even though there is a business called Manjaro GmbH with its office in Germany, and legally registered there, this business does not produce nor distribute Manjaro. Said business works with other businesses, who in turn develop hardware and then pre-install Manjaro onto said hardware.
In other words — and this really does appear to require spelling out — Manjaro, the Arch-based GNU/Linux distribution, is not the product of Manjaro GmbH, the commercial business registered in Germany.
So, if you, as a citizen of the United States of ·Acronymia America decide to download Manjaro, the Arch-based GNU/Linux distribution, then you are downloading hundreds if not thousands of little software packages from all over the world, none of which have any legal representation in your country. You’re not even downloading it from servers belonging to the Manjaro GmbH in Germany.
Look, it’s not dissimilar to the whole debacle we had with respect to the inclusion/exclusion of video codecs in mesa. Arch never excluded them, and Arch is a predominantly American distribution.
But we excluded them for a while, by way of a modified mesa package, notwithstanding the fact that Europe does not even recognize software patents — literally, software patents have no legal value in Europe — and that Manjaro isn’t even an American entity.
Thankfully, some of us in the Team stood up against this madness, so that people with an AMD GPU can now use the same codecs as everyone else without having to jump through any burning hoops.
The way it went with the far more important Chat Control laws, i do not expect a mass reaction in the society about this. Unfortunately. 
It was enough to cause a pause when I went to a store, and asked for fun for the salesperson to point me towards the computers with a fast CPU, a lot of RAM and a decent-sized SSD, but skip the graphics capabilities and no pre-installed OS is a bonus. He tapped his pad for a good 5 minutes with an increasingly furrowed brow and found one with everything but the last. He said he has no clue what I need a thing like that for. 
Was about to point back to an earlier comment I made about “Operating system” not being defined in the text, but went to go over the text again and:
(g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops,
licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile
device, or any other general purpose computing device.
It’s embedded in there. It seemed like a weird thing to lack, but apparently my eyes were too hasty.
Here’s another thing to consider…
In a traditional UNIX system, where does one draw the line between what constitutes the operating system and what constitutes application software?
I’m not kidding, and I’m excluding macOS from “traditional UNIX” right now for reasons which will become clear farther down.
Snaps, FlatPaks, AppImages, yes, that’s application software. An office suite, yes, that could be considered application software. With a bit of ill will, so could something like kdenlive be.
But on account of everything else? UNIX was specifically conceived to be a toolbox, whereby applications are not standalone entities — as opposed to in Microsoft Windows, macOS, or in mobile operating systems like Android and iOS — but where they are simply more tools in the box.
UNIX does not distinguish between operating system and application, because the application is just another utility in the system. This is why most — not all, but most — graphical utilities in a UNIX system are only graphical front-ends to command-line utilities that perform the real work in the background.
Take something like k3b, for instance. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a very good CD/DVD burning tool. It’s qt-based, and it’s so good that even die-hard gtk afficionados were rather using that than one of its gtk-based counterparts.
Only… k3b doesn’t really do anything all on its own. It uses cdparanoia and cdrecord in the background. All it does by itself is present things to you by way of a GUI.
In Windows, you’ve got a “C:\Program Files”, and macOS does something similar with its “Applications” folder — which actually offers an even tighter isolation and containerization than Windows, and more akin to Snaps, FlatPaks or AppImages, while Windows will still throw the shared libraries together under “C:\Windows\System” somewhere, so that it can spice things up by occasionally introducing you to “DLL Hell”.
But UNIX? Nope. You install something in UNIX and it becomes part of the operating system itself.
Or at least, generally speaking. I’ve already mentioned office suites, and perhaps (GUI-based) web browsers like firefox, chromium, brave, et al.
Think about it. Creating an absurd law is easy. But if it becomes so absurd that it cannot possibly be implemented in any physically and/or technically acceptable way, then it’s unenforceable.
Unless this actually benefits major players in the tech economy.
::Removes Tin Foil Hat::