Open Source has always been about freedom: the freedom to share, modify, and run code without hidden costs or mandatory government mandates. However, a new wave of legislation is changing that reality.
In California (AB 1043), Brazil (Lei 15.211), Utah (SB 142), and several other jurisdictions around the world, new laws are being passed that require OS-level age verification for internet access. Under the guise of "child safety," these laws mandate the collection of government-issued IDs and real-time biometric data for minors accessing technology.
This isn't about protecting children; it's about building a compliance moat around Big Tech.
- Apple & Google: Have armies of lawyers and billions in treasury to comply easily. They passed these laws.
- Open Source Communities: Cannot afford the cost, legal risk, or infrastructure overhead.
- The Result: These laws kill smaller platforms while protecting the giants. If a project complies, it risks becoming a state surveillance tool. If a project refuses compliance, it risks being pulled from the app store or sued into oblivion.
We are releasing this addendum to give developers and users an explicit way out of this surveillance trap. GURAv1 (Geographic Use Restriction Addendum v1.0) is not a standard license term; it is a statement of non-compliance with government overreach.
By adding this to your repository, you:
- Reject the Scam: You signal that your project will not be incorporated into government trackers or surveillance networks under state mandate.
- Save Time & Money: You avoid the massive engineering cost required to build age-gate infrastructure, backend ID verification, and legal compliance teams for states like California, Texas, and Brazil.
- Protect User Privacy: You explicitly refuse to collect the private data that these laws demand, keeping your users' information off government databases.
- Maintain Independence: You ensure that open-source software remains independent of regulatory capture by state legislatures and the major platforms they favor.
This document supplements your existing license (e.g., MIT, GPL, Apache). If a person or an entity falls within the Restricted Jurisdiction, they are explicitly revoked access from using your code under these mandates.
- This means, your code explicitly bans usage from within the Restricted Jurisdiction, and hence you have no legal obligation to comply to the additional age-checking mandates.
We believe that software distributed by the open-source community should be free of government data-collection obligations. We do not support such laws and we want to ensure our projects remain tools for freedom, not instruments of state tracking.
In practical terms; no - It won’t technically prevent access or use, but it clearly states that such use is outside the terms you support or permit. It is inherently difficult to contain software once they're published, moreover, that is not the goal of this addendum.
Further read: Code as Speech
Some repos ships compiled binaries as releases or program helpers to the source code. This addendum settles the argument of whether a repo file is a speech or a compiled software once and for all.
Under the definition of "open source" as outlined in https://opensource.org/osd, adding this addendum to your project terminates your project's state from being "opensourced", as this addendum explicitly discriminates users from a certain geographical area, violating rule 5.
However, for other areas not within the Restricted Jurisdiction, rules as outlined from your base licence applies. For example, using this addendum on top of MIT license stops it from being MIT, and stops your project from being in a state of opensource, but the licence agreement as outlined by the MIT licence still applies to users/entities who are outside of the Restricted Jurisdiction.
Thanks to @DangerBlack for his research and contribution on this important distinction.
- https://agelesslinux.org/
- https://doctorow.medium.com/
- https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf
If you want your work featured here, add GURA and submit an issue.
Stay independent.