California lawmakers unanimously passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems distributed under GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses from the Digital Age Assurance Act. The Senate amended the bill on August 21, passing it 39-0 on August 26, with the Assembly concurring the following day. The amendment redefines "operating system provider" to exclude entities distributing OS under permissive open-source licenses, removing Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from the law's scope.

A second exclusion covers software components not offered as stand-alone executables through covered application stores, libraries and dependencies distributed via package managers like apt and pacman are exempt. A third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, taking browser extension stores out of scope. The amendments also removed the original definition of "user," which classified every device owner in California as a child.

Lawmakers inserted a provision prohibiting requesting age signals from OS providers unless required by law, closing off potential abuse of the age API. Platforms and developers gain a good-faith safe harbor against erroneous signals. Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain fully in scope, with age collection required at account setup from January 1, 2027.

Steam OS status remains unclear due to its mix of open-source components and proprietary Steam client. Graphene OS now falls outside the law's scope entirely. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who wrote both the original act and the amendment, introduced the exemption following criticism from Linux developers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.