Reverse WSL? I Tried This New Tool to Integrate Windows Apps in Linux

Microsoft's WSL allows people to use Linux inside Windows. It integrates well in the system allowing people to use Linux command line Windows. Linux GUI apps can also be used, which helps for editing config file in GUI-based editors.

Now reverse the situation. How about using Windows applications on Linux? Sure, WINE and Bottles are there but I came across a new tool that combines container technology with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to give you native-app feel for Windows software on Linux.

I am going to share my experience with Winpodx for running Windows software on Linux in this article. But first, lets briefly understand its mechanism.

How Winpodx Works

Under the hood, Winpodx relies on open-source tools like Podman, FreeRDP, and the dockur/windows project to spin up a lightweight, isolated Windows environment. This way, it runs a specialized Windows instance inside a background container. Then, instead of rendering a full virtual machine interface, it uses FreeRDP to seamlessly stream individual Windows applications directly to the Linux desktop, making them behave like native apps.

This setup allows Windows applications to launch and blend into the underlying Linux desktop with minimal overhead.

If needed, we can also access the full Windows desktop environment, which I will cover in a later section of this article.

Installing Winpodx

🚧

You'll need high-end system with at least 16 GB RAM. Fast and stable internet connection is a must for the installation as it downloads Windows ISO.

Before beginning the installation, there are a few important resource requirements to keep in mind. On its first launch, the installer will automatically download a full Windows ISO, which requires a fast and stable internet connection.

Second, because this setup runs a complete Windows operating system in the background, it is resource-intensive. To avoid performance issues, the host system should meet the following requirements:

• Storage: A minimum of 50+ GB of free disk space. The installer explicitly recommends at least 64 GB of free storage space for a safe and stable setup.
• RAM: At least 4 GB needed for the Windows container itself, alongside enough remaining host memory to keep the Linux system running smoothly. So, your system must have at least 16 GB of RAM for it to function smoothly.

If your system meets these requirements, install Winpodx using its universal installer script. Ensure curl is installed, open the terminal, and run:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kernalix7/winpodx/main/install.sh | bash

The script will automatically configure the necessary packages and background containers.

To use the graphical configuration tool (winpodx gui), I needed to manually install the Python bindings for Qt. On an Arch Linux system, install this additional package via pacman:

sudo pacman -S pyside6

💡Tip: Managing the container after a reboot

Although Winpodx is designed to auto-start the background environment when you click an app icon, you might see a warning that the "pod is not started" after a fresh reboot.

If that happens, or if you just want to ensure everything is ready before you begin working, you can manually fire up the container using this command:

winpodx pod start --wait

Winpodx Start

Once the command finishes executing, the containerized Windows environment will be fully active and ready to launch apps or open the configuration GUI.

Exploring the features of Winpodx

Let me share some of the major features of this application that I tried.

Using Microsoft-specific pre-installed Windows apps in Linux

Microsoft Windows 11 comes with a number of default applications like notepad, paint, calculator etc.

This is the core feature of the tool. Applications installed inside the Windows container can be made available directly in the Linux system menus. Naturally, applications that aren't installed yet inside the container won't show up or be accessible to run.

To see what we have available, first, list the installed Windows applications using the command:

winpodx app list

This will output a list of the apps inside Windows that are ready to be integrated into Linux.

List Windows Apps

You can be selective:

winpodx app install app-name

Or, add them all to the host system, run:

winpodx app install-all

💡

Latest versions supports auto-discovery of apps.

This command automatically generates and registers .desktop files for all the compatible Windows apps so they populate the application launcher of the Linux system.

Regardless of whether they show up in the desktop environment's menu, you can always bypass the GUI and launch any Windows application directly from the Linux terminal using:

winpodx app run <app_name>

Where <app_name> is the exact name of the application as it appears in the winpodx app list output.

Get full Windows desktop

Winpodx gives you the option to run the full Windows guest desktop interface. While this isn't necessary for launching standalone apps, it becomes essential when you install new applications inside the guest Windows environment or tweak system configurations.

To launch the full Windows desktop, use the following command:

winpodx app run desktop

Windows Desktop

Alternatively, the same Windows desktop is accessible directly via a web browser. Connect to it by opening your favorite browser and navigating to port 8007:

http://127.0.0.1:8007

Windows Desktop in Browser

💡

Whenever you want a new application available through Winpodx, open this full desktop view, use the installer, and install it within the guest Windows instance.

I recommend downloading the installer file to the host system and then accessing the installer from the guest system.

Accessing Linux files in Windows

The guest Windows environment is integrated with the host system so that we can seamlessly access the Linux files from within the Windows container. This tight integration is precisely what sets this tool apart from a traditional, isolated Windows Virtual Machine.

The primary use case for this is opening and modifying Linux files directly with Windows applications. For example, you can use Windows Notepad or a specific Windows-only IDE to edit code or text stored on the Linux drive.

Opening Files

Secondly, this shared file system allows us to manage, organize, and work with the host files natively from within the guest Windows session, making cross-platform workflows incredibly smooth.

Managing everything from GUI

Winpodx includes a clean, graphical configuration tool built with Qt. This utility provides a central hub to manage the containerized setup without relying solely on the command line. We can use it to quickly launch a full desktop session, adjust system-level preferences, and monitor the container's status.

To open this Qt settings window from the host machine, simply run the following command:

winpodx gui

Winpodx GUI

Install Windows Apps

You can install Windows-only applications inside the containerized Windows session using standard .exe installers.

Run full desktop (or web interface) of Windows, download exe file and complete the program's installation wizard. You know the drill of installing an application on Windows, I hope.

After that. register the app with Winpodx so it can be launched from Linux. For that, open the Qt settings application:

winpodx gui

Inside the GUI, click on the Add App option and fill out the profile fields for the new program. If not sure of the exact executable path of the app, its always available in the properties of the application's shortcut file inside the Windows environment.

Create App Profile

After saving the app profile in the GUI, verify that Winpodx recognizes it by listing the available applications:

winpodx app list

Once it appears in the list, register and install the shortcut to the Linux desktop environment using the following command:

winpodx app install <appname>

For example, I installed the Notion desktop client, and integrated it into the system using:

winpodx app install notion

Notion and Evernote

Opening Windows files in Linux apps

Winpodx features a Reverse Open capability.

This is incredibly useful if you plan to work inside the full Windows Desktop environment frequently but still prefer your host Linux workflows for specific tasks.

For example, if you double-click a .txt or .md file inside the Windows guest, you can right-click it, head to the "Open with..." menu, and select a native Linux application like your host's text editor.

Open in Linux App

There is a dedicated "Linux Apps" folder, pinned to the sidebar of the Windows File Explorer, that contains a list of Linux apps available.

List of Linux Apps

💡

Winpodx also supports bidirectional copy-paste. There is scope for USB device passthrough as well.

Uninstalling Winpodx

If you decide that Winpodx isn't the right fit for your workflow, the project provides a dedicated uninstaller script to clean up its files, configurations, and containers. Depending on how thoroughly you want to wipe the data, there are two options:

To remove the Winpodx files but preserve the underlying Windows container data run:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kernalix7/winpodx/main/uninstall.sh | bash -s -- --confirm

This is useful if you plan to reinstall later or want to keep the data intact

To completely wipe everything, including the massive Windows container, the virtual disk image, and all configuration directories, use the command:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kernalix7/winpodx/main/uninstall.sh | bash -s -- --purge

The uninstaller script handles the Winpodx ecosystem and its containers, but it will not touch your system package manager.

Any core packages installed during the initial setup like Podman or optional dependencies like pyside6 will need to be uninstalled separately using your distribution's package manager.

Winpodx for the win(dows)?

Winpodx offers an innovative solution for accessing Windows applications on Linux system, provided you have a high-spec machine with plenty of resources to spare.

During testing, I occasionally encountered minor input lag and screen artifacts.

However, despite these occasional graphical hiccups, the majority of the applications remained functional and usable.

It is worth noting the contrast in cross-platform integration. Because of Linux's incredibly small resource footprint, running Linux GUI applications inside Windows (via WSL) is a much lighter process.

Conversely, running a full Windows environment on top of Linux via containers is naturally a heavy, resource-intensive operation. As development continues, the project will hopefully achieve better optimization and smoother performance in future updates.

Did you find this tool interesting? Will you give it a shot on your system, or do you prefer sticking to a traditional Windows dual-boot? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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Steam Deck OLED is Absurdly Overpriced Now, Yet It Sold Out in North America Overnight

The Steam Deck OLED has been largely off the shelves since mid-February, being among the casualties of the RAM and storage shortage that has been driving up prices across consumer tech since late 2025.

It recently came back on May 27, just not at the prices everyone was hoping for.

Valve bumped the pricing for the 512GB OLED from $549 to $789 and the 1TB model from $649 to $949; that is a near-50% jump on the top model, btw. The cheaper LCD variant is gone entirely, having been discontinued before any of this played out.

The company announced the price hike by saying that the "Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole."

Gone in under 24 hours

People bought them anyway. North America sold out in under 24 hours, price hike and all. You would think an absurd jump in prices on a two-and-a-half-year-old handheld would give people some concern, but apparently not.

Valve's store page warns that the Steam Deck OLED "may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." That warning is not new, and going by how things have played out since February, it is not decorative either.

The handheld has been in and out of stock so unpredictably that catching it at the right moment has been more luck than anything else.

Back now

As of writing, both OLED models are showing as available in North America. I checked the Steam store and was able to add both to the cart without issue, with an estimated delivery window of 6-10 business days.

Whether that holds is another question entirely. 😵

For the rest of the world, the Europe, Australia, and Asia markets are served through Valve's partner Komodo, who have reportedly seen better stock ups than North America throughout this period, though that too keeps shifting.

Why this keeps happening

The RAM and SSD shortage that took hold in late 2025 is the main culprit. AI infrastructure has been consuming memory and storage at a pace that the consumer market is still processing, with prices unlikely to normalize any time soon.

It is not just Valve feeling this either.

Only yesterday, we covered how Raspberry Pi pushed through another round of price hikes in April, citing a seven-fold rise in LPDDR4 costs over the past year. The Raspberry Pi 6 itself has been pushed out to 2028 at the earliest, partly because of where the memory market sits.

For anyone holding out for better prices or more reliable stock, the situation does not look like it will improve anytime soon. And maybe that kind of sentiment is precisely why the Steam Deck OLED is going out of stock so quickly?

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FOSS Weekly #26.22: Win for Linux, Firefox New AI Feature, AMD Betrayal, Rust Linux Commands and More

Good news on the age verification front, though. California and Colorado have both moved to exempt open source software from their age verification laws after neither bill originally made any concessions for community-run projects.

Warp's Oz platform has been updated with multi-harness support, meaning teams can now run Claude Code, Codex, and Warp's own agent side by side under unified access controls and audit logs.

The SFC has formally accused Bambu Lab of two AGPLv3 violations, shipping a proprietary networking library alongside AGPLv3 code without releasing its source, and threatening a developer with a cease-and-desist for building a compatible fork that didn't even touch the proprietary parts.

For a few days, German rail operator Deutsche Bahn's website was turning away Linux users, treating them as bot users. DB blamed overzealous bot filtering and says it's now fixed. Many Linux users still complain.

AMD let students, academics, and hardware tinkerers build FPGA workflows around free Linux support in Vivado, then quietly moved Linux to a $1,800 paid tier.

Intel engineers have submitted a driver for Linux 7.2 that turns a USB4 cable into a direct data pipe between two machines. It doesn't interact with the networking stack.

Raspberry Pi 6 won't be coming before 2028 and it won't have NPU. Guess we just have to wait.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• What LTS releases entail.
• Alternatives to MS Planner.
• Nanoclaw setup.
• Firefox introducing a very useful feature.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

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🧠 What We’re Thinking About

A KDE developer makes the case that rolling distros often have fewer bugs in practice since upstream fixes actually reach you.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

You can get kanban without the Microsoft tax. We have covered six open source Planner alternatives, from Mattermost's Focalboard to the Penpot team's Taiga. Most are self-hostable; a couple have free cloud tiers if you'd rather not run your own server.

Getting Rust on Linux comes down to two options. The official installer via rustup gives you the latest version without needing root access. Installing through your package manager is simpler and covers all users on the system.

Speaking of Rust, how about experimenting with Rust alternatives of the classic Linux commands?

Ever wondered why the internet went from IPv4 straight to IPv6? IPv5 actually existed as an experimental streaming protocol for voice and video, but it inherited IPv4's 32-bit address space and its 4.3 billion address ceiling.

By the time a real IPv4 successor was needed, the only sensible move was a complete overhaul, and IPv6 with its 128-bit addressing was the result.

Desktop Linux is mostly neglected by the industry but loved by the community. For the past 13 years, It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux on their personal computers. And we are now facing the existential threat from AI models stealing our content.

If you like what we do and would love to support our work, please become It's FOSS Plus member. It costs less than the cost of a McDonald Happy Meal a month, and you get an ad-free reading experience with the satisfaction of helping the desktop Linux community.

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👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

HP has pitched in as a Premier sponsor for the LVFS project.

Tired of AI fluff and misinformation in your Google feed? Get real, trusted Linux content. Add It’s FOSS as your preferred source and see our reliable Linux and open-source stories highlighted in your Discover feed and search results.

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✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Firefox is not a new app per se, but its new PDF merging feature is a must-try if you are fed up of those signup-walled online services.

That's not the only new Firefox offering. Sourav also tried the AI browsing mode, called Smart Window, in Firefox. This is an upcoming feature for which we got a bit early access. Here's his experience with Firefox Smart Window.

📽️ Videos for You

I am trying local AI and open source LLMs these days. And I thought of sharing my exploration with you. To begin with, I share how you can set up Nanoclaw on a Raspberry Pi. Nanoclaw gives you an AI agent that you can use as a personal assistant. More on its usage later.

Subscribe to It's FOSS YouTube Channel

💡 Quick Handy Tip

If you are using the Ghostty terminal emulator in GNOME Desktop, you can install the ghostty-nautilus package to get a "Open in Ghostty" option in the right-click context menu on Files.

This works on Arch Linux and its derivatives. You just have to run this command:

sudo pacman -S ghostty-nautilus

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How up-to-date are you on Linux kernel trivia?

Winslop will make you run to the nearest trash can. 🚮

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On May 29, 1985, Eastman Kodak introduced the Ektaprint Electronic Publishing System, a $50,000 machine assembled from Sun, Canon, and Interleaf parts that let companies professionally edit and print graphics—capabilities that today come standard on any laptop costing far less.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: One of our FOSSers is not convinced with Waterfox as a privacy-first browser, while another is looking for reviews of writerDeck, a DIY project.

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Don't Expect a Raspberry Pi 6 Until At Least 2028

If you've been holding out for a next-gen Raspberry Pi, the wait just got a lot longer.

Eben Upton joined fellow Raspberry Pi honchos, James Adams, the CTO of Hardware Engineering, and Gordon Hollingworth, the CTO of Software Engineering, for a Reddit AMA on r/engineering last week, and the Pi 6 release timeline was among the top things to come up.

Eben's response put the Pi 6 on a 4 to 4.5-year cycle from the Pi 5 launch, meaning early 2028 at the absolute earliest. He didn't seem in any particular rush either, noting the Pi 5 is still a capable flagship that could comfortably hold that position beyond even that window.

According to him, the new SBC will essentially be a Pi 5 with better internals like a faster CPU, more I/O, and more DRAM bandwidth. He called it "quantitative changes, not qualitative ones," meaning no new ports, no M.2 slot, nothing that would make the current board feel dated by comparison.

The RAM situation isn't helping

The timing makes a bit more sense once you look at what memory prices have been doing. In April, Raspberry Pi pushed through another round of price increases, pointing to a seven-fold rise in LPDDR4 DRAM costs over the past year.

That announcement also introduced a 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 at $83.75, as a way to give prospective buyers a cheaper option between the 2GB and the now-considerably-pricier 4GB.

The Pi Zero 2W is in the same boat. Eben flagged it as the only product in an actual shortage right now, with supply squeezed by AI chip demand. A new supplier has been brought on though, with expectations that stocks will recover before the year is out.

So for now, the Raspberry Pi 5 remains the best the lineup has to offer, at prices that would have raised eyebrows a couple of years ago.

---

Suggested Read 📖: A New Linux Driver For USB4

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I Tried Firefox Smart Window, and It Won Me Over a Little

Mozilla has received plenty of flak for adding AI features to Firefox, like a chatbot in the sidebar, automatic alt text in PDFs, AI-powered tab group suggestions, and whatnot.

It's been one thing after another, and while people might appreciate that these can be disabled, the sheer pace of the additions does make one wonder where it all ends.

Their latest experiment in this space is the Smart Window, currently in beta and rolling out to users in the United States and Canada on Firefox 150 and newer. I got access recently, and here's what I found.

📋

The feature showcased here is of pre-production quality. Expect things to break.

Good enough for daily use

Smart Window is essentially a new type of Firefox window, sitting alongside Classic and Private, that comes with a built-in AI assistant. Unlike the existing chatbot sidebar, this one can actually see your open tabs, your browsing history, and the page you're currently on.

You can ask it questions, get article summaries, compare things across tabs, and have it help you plan stuff, all without leaving the browser or reaching for a separate chat tool.

We covered this back in November last year, when Mozilla announced what it was calling "AI Window" and opened a waitlist for early signups. At the time, it was mostly promises like building it in the open, keeping things opt-in, and giving users control over their data.

Now, there's a working version that I tested on an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS system with Firefox 151.0.2 installed from Mozilla's official deb package. First, I had to log in with my Mozilla account (that had early beta access) and visit the Smart Window portal (linked earlier) to activate it on my browser.

This is how I got access to Smart Window.

Once through the portal, Firefox runs you through a quick setup with updated Terms of Use and a separate Privacy Policy to accept.

Once in, you get to pick between three experiences. Fast uses Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, Flexible runs on Alibaba's Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, and Personal is powered by OpenAI's gpt-oss-120B.

After that, you pick what Smart Window is allowed to learn from, with options like "Chats in Smart Window" and "Browsing activity across Firefox" ticked on by default.

Unfortunately, I had accidentally gone with Personal, not seeing that it was powered by an OpenAI model, so I went into Settings > AI controls > Smart Window and switched over to Flexible.

There's also a Custom option for connecting your own LLM endpoint, though Mozilla's documentation flags that local models may not always play nicely with Smart Window.

With the model situation sorted, I asked the AI a question related to a hypothetical life-related occurrence. While it took some time processing the request, its replies were on point. It even suggested follow-up questions to ask that were very relevant.

See below for a demo. 👇

Summarizing content such as books, articles, and research papers is probably the most practical use of the Smart Window, in my opinion. I asked it to go through an article of mine on Bambu Lab being naughty with AGPLv3, and it gave me two options.

One was to search for it on the default search engine, and the other was to ask the AI model directly.

I chose the latter, and it spat out a detailed summary of the coverage, complete with some follow-up question suggestions. The output quality was good throughout, and I didn't spot any major issues.

I also tried it out as a search tool, typing in "best food to pair with shawarma." That went fine, but the more interesting part was when I decided to push further.

I asked whether the suggestions the search result (Gemini AI overview) was giving were rooted in authentic culinary traditions or were the result of misappropriation.

It engaged with the question properly, which I wasn't expecting from an in-development browser feature. 🤓

If you were wondering, all your chats are automatically stored locally on your device, and you can get to them from the Chats button in a Smart Window tab. It groups conversations by date, shows you what each one was about, and even links back to the page that triggered the search.

Odd to see a chrome:// URL here (bottom-left).

If you go into the settings for this mode, you will find that there are toggles to control whether Smart Window opens by default when Firefox starts, whether the assistant sidebar shows up automatically on each new tab, what the assistant learns from (chats, browsing activity, or both), and which AI model powers it.

The 'AI controls' menu (left) and the 'Memories' menu (right).

Below all that is the "Manage memories" section, where you control what the assistant learns from.

You can view everything it has stored, delete individual memories you don't want sticking around, or turn the whole thing off entirely if you'd rather the assistant not learn from your activity at all.

And before you panic that Firefox is becoming AI-only, there's a Classic/Smart Window switcher in the title bar that gives you a dropdown to jump between the two modes instantly.

This way, your tabs stay put, nothing reloads, and going back to the classic browsing experience is just as fast as switching away from it.

What now?

Smart Window is shaping up well for a beta, and I wasn't expecting to say that. The AI integration is useful without being pushy, and Mozilla has mostly lived up to the opt-in commitments they made when they first announced this.

It's expected to roll out to more users over time, though Mozilla hasn't shared a specific date yet, so if you're outside the US and Canada right now, keep an eye out on their socials.

Meanwhile, if you are someone who'd rather keep AI features out of Firefox entirely (like me, on most days), Settings > AI Controls has a "Block AI enhancements" option that does exactly what it says.

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A New Linux Driver Could Make USB4 Cables a Blazing Fast Way to Move Data

Large data transfers are one of those things that always seem to find a way to be annoying. Tools like LocalSend make it easier over a local network, but wireless is not always an option, and some transfers are simply too important to leave to a Wi-Fi connection.

In such a scenario, a wired solution that does not require setting up networking at all would be ideal.

Intel's Thunderbolt maintainer Mika Westerberg and fellow Intel engineer Alan Borzeszkowski have been working on exactly that.

USB4STREAM explained

The two have put together a new protocol called USB4STREAM and a matching Linux driver called thunderbolt_stream. The approach is to let two or more machines transfer data directly over a USB4 or Thunderbolt cable without touching the networking stack at all.

Once configured, each host gets a character device at /dev/tbstreamX that behaves like a regular file. Any application that supports read(2) and write(2) operations works with it without needing any special patches.

In simple terms, any app that can perform read/write operations will be compatible with this.

How it works

Before data can flow, both machines need to have their streams configured. Streams are basically the individual data channels over the connection, and getting them set up is a matter of pointing both sides at each other through ConfigFS and assigning channel IDs.

This can be done automatically or manually, depending on how much control you require.

Once one side announces an active stream, the other can pick it up automatically just by using the same name for it. You can also run multiple streams at the same time, and the whole thing works alongside existing Thunderbolt plumbing without getting in the way.

Closing a stream notifies the other end as well, so both sides know when the transfer is complete.

When to expect?

The patch is currently sitting in the Thunderbolt git tree's next branch. Assuming it gets submitted to the USB/Thunderbolt tree ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window, it should land in that release. The ABI documentation in the patch already marks the target as v7.2.

The driver ships as a loadable module named thunderbolt_stream and depends on USB4_CONFIGFS being enabled.

USB4 keeps getting more relevant

The USB4 standard has been around since 2019 and has been getting steady attention in the kernel cycle after cycle.

What was once an Intel exclusive, royalty-gated technology has gradually become the preferred high-speed port on modern motherboards across both AMD and Intel platforms, with Thunderbolt increasingly becoming a certification badge.

USB4STREAM adds yet another practical reason to put that cable to work. If you have a USB4 port on your machine, then this driver could open up a surprisingly neat way to move data around without spinning up any networking at all.

Via: Phoronix

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Linux is Getting a Free Pass on Age Verification in California and Colorado

Age verification laws have been spreading fast, and we have been keeping tabs on them for a while now. California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was the first to land, signed in October 2025, with Colorado following with its own version (SB26-051).

Neither made any concessions for open source software in the original language, which left Linux distributions and other community-run projects in a very uncomfortable dilemma.

Both have since moved to fix that, with Colorado having wrapped it up earlier this month and California heading for a full Assembly vote.

What's California doing?

Look at the blue bits.

AB 1043 required OS providers to collect a user's age or birth date at account setup and share it with apps through a real-time API, starting January 1, 2027. Open Source projects got no special treatment in the original text, which is something we wrote about when the bills started drawing attention.

Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, who authored AB 1043 herself, introduced AB 1856 in February to address that.

After four rounds of revisions, the bill has rewritten the definition of "operating system provider" to exclude anyone distributing an OS under terms that let recipients copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

Most Linux distributions under permissive or copyleft licenses fall cleanly within that.

In tandem, another change covers the application side, where software that is not offered as a standalone executable through a covered app store is no longer treated as an "application" under the law.

The bill passed the Appropriations Committee 11-0 on May 14. It was ordered to third reading on May 19 and is awaiting an assembly vote. Interestingly, Buffy is the chair of that committee.

What about Colorado?

The formatting of this bill document could be better. ☠️

Colorado's path here involved some direct community legwork. Carl Richell, the founder of System76, spent some considerable time working with Senator Matt Ball, one of SB26-051's co-authors, to get open source exclusions written into the bill.

The bill exempts OS providers and developers distributing software under terms that permit copying, redistribution, and modification. It also adds a requirement that exempt software have no platform-imposed technical or contractual restrictions on installing modified versions.

The extra clause is aimed at tivoization, where manufacturers lock down hardware to block modified software from running even when the source code is freely available.

Beyond that, code repository providers, containerized software distributions, and applications from free, publicly available code repositories are explicitly excluded too.

The law also has a narrower scope, only applying to OS providers that operate a covered app store or ship one pre-installed. An OS provider with no app store involvement does not come into scope at all.

Besides that, SB26-051 is now set to take effect on July 1, 2028.

Some closing words…

Neither state got here automatically. The open source exemptions did not exist in either bill to start with, and it took sustained community pressure and direct legislative outreach to get them added.

This is something that can be applied to many other issues, of course. Though, when the representatives are more interested in serving certain interests (say due to pressure from certain lobbies) than their constituents, disruption tends to be the only way out.

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