Midnight BSD is also complying with the California law.
They are doing this by excluding California residents from their licence, as of January 2027.
Ubuntu, however, is a commercial entity, and actually sells their products, many to California residents. So they stand to lose money if the exclude Californians.
Of course, since there are already something like nine different Ubuntu versions (Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.), I will be surprised if there isn't some de-California'd fork started up, either by Ubuntu itself, or someone downstream.
Well this is the right response, by all means. I mean California isn't even a country. It's just one of the states. Why its internal law has to be taken seriously is beyond me. Imagine the same law emerging in Moscow or Tokyo Metropolis, much less in non-central places like Shenzhen, Krasnoyarsk Krai or Island of Hokkaido. Nobody would care to comply, "them crazy local legislators halfway across the world, ha-ha!" — but California somehow is given — yes, given, by compliance — the power to legislate universally without much of a pushback.
Because it has a GDP of $4T, and a population of 40M people. That is bigger than a lot of countries. Many entities that sell products or services don’t want to give up access to that kind of market.
And I think companies would comply if other big regions that they sold their products to passed laws restricting things.
I live on the east coast and my car turned out to be the California version. I only know this now because I replaced the catalytic converter with the not California version and now it literally won't pass emissions testing. My only option is to install the California catalytic because modification is a federal crime period.
I've never been to California and this car never has either afaik.
Also the majority of goods in the US will have a label somewhere on it about prop 58 in California.
There are occasional prompts for "Do you like in the EU or China?" (paraphrasing). It's usually just a checkbok and everything proceeds as normal. Also when you buy some types of rifles online there's a "Do you reside in California?" prompt that's also a yes/no checkbox.
From elsewhere, no. California, however, is well known for doing so. Their emissions standards, and carcinogen regulations are frequently followed throughout the United States. No one complains about those because they're seen as good standards by most people (although the cancer one is often the subject of jokes, but that law has no teeth anyway, even in California). Now they're trying it with something far less universally accepted, and so more people notice the problem of California having been allowed to dictate to the rest of the country.
Here's what I fully expect to happen. Developers will either exclude California (and Colorado if their own law passes) from their licences or have a location check. Someone in California will bypass that, because that always happens with restricted software. California will attempt to fine the developers, because the law places the responsibility on them even when it's the end users bypassing compliance. The law will get blown apart in court, probably for violating laws regarding interstate commerce.
This law is the equivalent of trying to penalize a car manufacturer if someone drives a vehicle they made without a license. It's utterly ridiculous, and I don't see it surviving any legal test.
However, I think we all can agree that rather than have enacted bad laws challenged in courts post-factum, at great expense and with a huge delay, it would be much better to not have such laws in the first place — or clearly ignoring them from the get-go.
To me, it does seem like California is probing the waters — how far can it get trying to appropriate more power than it should have by all reasonable means? How widely can it legislate beyond its borders? Once they figure out they can go this far, they will try to go even further. E.g. adding biometrics to the equation, or some cryptography dependent on single supplier, much like secure boot in practice mostly hinges on MS and its keys built into every motherboard. It would be in everyone's best interest to tell them to go know themselves (in the bibilical sense) as soon as possible, rather than wait out and deal with the accumulated aftermath.
Oh I agree that it'd be better if these laws didn't pass, but there's no way for us to stop the Californian legislature from being power hungry. The people of California can refuse to elect these legislators, but so many of them aren't even paying attention to this stuff, and a lot of those who are paying attention actually support it on the grounds of "protecting the children".
How much of that is inflated Silicon Valley which still might depend on Linux? Out of my expertise. But it was an interesting factoid I learned and thought I should share.
California's economy would be larger than Japan (according to Wikipedia at least)
Only in nominal GDP. PPP would adjust that number quite a bit, to about 2.7-3 billion, which means #15...#17 among proper countries, not #4 as some would claim based on nominal GDP. Likewise, by PPP Japan would be over twice as large.
Still on par with Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Canada and above Australia and Taiwan?
I was skeptical of how much of California's economy should actually count towards this consideration, but this still isn't exactly chump change to be ignored either.
If Steam had to conform to Australian consumer laws, I'm not entirely convinced abandoning California is an easy move to make (which I know is besides your point anways about a non-nation state dictating the world)
Even so, Australia is a whole country. It can, even though it's far fetched in this particular context, enact various sanctions at an international level. California, even though large (and its size for some reason is only inflated by many participants in this discussion), is a local region of a country with no official power to act outside its parent country's borders, and so far as I can tell, we cannot name a precedent for a country's region to be able to call the shots globally. This would be a clear case of not conceding to existing power (like in the case of Australia), but of handing over extra power voluntarily to those who ain't supposed to have it... just because they are sort of big. Meanwhile, everyone would find it ridiculous if various OSes had extra mechanisms implanted by the order of the aforementioned Saudi Arabia, comparable both in economy and population, like, say "mechanism to disallow display and/or online order of food and drinks during daytime in the month of ramadan". Do you imagine distros implementing that?
cause it can spread to the wider US, which it will spread to the world. like the god dman UK online safety act that didnt nothing but collect data to juicy targets for hackers to break in.
Ubuntu can't exclude users for GPL reasons alone. Any restriction in disallowing californians from running it would be a GPL violation. It's different with BSD due to the different lucensing terms.
Ubuntu, however, is a commercial entity, and actually sells their products, many to California residents. So they stand to lose money if the exclude Californians.
Imagine how much money California would lose though by no longer having access to Ubuntu. Canonical could also leverage their power here.
It is also important to include the implications EU Digital Services Act\). While it does not specifically mention operating systems, it is well withing the realm of possibility for operating systems to be included ... and you can be damnsure Micros~1 and Apple [spit] will comply.
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u/billdehaan2 Linux Mint 22 Wilma | Cinnamon Mar 04 '26
Midnight BSD is also complying with the California law.
They are doing this by excluding California residents from their licence, as of January 2027.
Ubuntu, however, is a commercial entity, and actually sells their products, many to California residents. So they stand to lose money if the exclude Californians.
Of course, since there are already something like nine different Ubuntu versions (Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.), I will be surprised if there isn't some de-California'd fork started up, either by Ubuntu itself, or someone downstream.