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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.