Amid the controversy about the upcoming California and Colorado age verification laws, System76 CEO, Carl Richell, revealed that he was meeting with lawmakers to champion exemptions that would allow open-source operating systems, like Linux distributions, to forego the inclusion of such age verification systems. As reported by GamingOnLinux, Article 30 of Colorado Senate Bill 26-051, now available online in its final form, now states that the article does not apply to "an operating system provider or developer that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software without any platform-imposed technical or contractual restrictions imposed by the provider or developer on installing all modified versions."

For its part, the California Digital Age Assurance Act, bill AB 1856, now contains similar verbiage relating to open-source OS providers, except California excludes open-source developers from the bill entirely. A recent amendment to the bill reads: "'Operating system provider' does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software." These exemptions functionally mean that most Linux distributions will not require users to submit information for age verifications, although the water gets a bit murkier with dual-license distributions, like SteamOS. In the case of SteamOS, although the underlying Arch Linux-based distribution is open-source and exempt, the included Steam Client is still a proprietary app store that will likely require age data. Notably there does not seem to be an exception in the California bill for open-source or similarly licensed browsers, which means open-source browsers, like Firefox and Chromium, may still need to build in support to request the signal for age attestation from the operating system.