Age verification laws don't seem to be stopping. California, Colorado, and Brazil, all have some version of the same requirement where OS providers must collect age data at account setup and expose it to apps through a real-time API.
Governments call it child safety, but plenty of people in the open source space call it something else entirely. The reactions have ranged from protest distros to a systemd fork to a BSD project that straight up banned users in affected regions.
Now, Fedora's Project Leader has said something that might give other Linux distributions a potential way out of this quagmire (no giggity).
What's happening?
A wall of text posted on Fedora's Discourse forum proposed a fairly ambitious architectural workaround that involved ripping out the networking code, with the original poster asking for feedback on it.
The thread went about how you would expect, and after a certain point, Jef Spaleta chimed in with a simpler take. There's no need for workarounds; instead, Linux distros could just adopt the same API Apple has already built and deployed, hooking it into the account setup process.
Jef further suggested that the implementation could run entirely locally through a unix socket or a dbus call, with no data leaving the machine.
He backed this up by pointing out that GNOME already ships parental controls with account creation time controls that can designate an account as restricted and a signal other software can query.
The catch is that GNOME built its system around content categories (OARS) rather than age ranges, which is what the laws specifically describe. Jef thinks that gap exists because the people writing the bills had never heard of OARS and defaulted to age brackets instead.
He wrapped up, noting that:
So now its a matter of hopefully, just adopting a standard API, probably the Apple API, so that all Linux OSes can expose a standard parental controls that meets legislated expectations. Its not about being clever, this is a standardization process with legislation as a forcing function.
Keep in mind that Jef used the word "could" for a reason though. This is one person's viewpoint in a community forum thread, not a Fedora roadmap commitment or a formal cross-distro proposal. Whether it goes anywhere depends entirely on whether other maintainers decide to treat it as a starting point.
And that is not a given. Getting Linux distributions to agree on a shared standard is already a massive ask. Getting them to adopt an Apple API specifically, for laws a big chunk of the community considers overreach, is a hard sell.
