[$] openSUSE "terms of site" raise complaints about age restrictions
The openSUSE project faced backlash over its updated terms of service that imposed an age restriction of 16 years for users. This change, which required parental approval for users under 16, was criticized for potentially limiting participation from younger contributors. Following complaints from community members, the terms have been modified, but the age requirement remains in place for account creation.
- ▪The age restriction was added to openSUSE's terms of service on March 10, 2026.
- ▪Dominik George, founder of Teckids, argued that there is no legal basis for banning minors from using the site.
- ▪The openSUSE board member Jeff Mahoney stated that the age requirement was not requested by the project or board.
LWN.net (Linux Weekly News) files mainly under tech. We currently carry 86 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | LWN.net (Linux Weekly News) |
| Canonical URL | https://lwn.net/Articles/1072689/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 15:27:08 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T15:29:57.691Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T15:29:59.041Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | CwlCSGvTbAZt |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
LWN.net needs you! Without subscribers, LWN would simply not exist. Please consider signing up for a subscription and helping to keep LWN publishing. By Joe BrockmeierMay 19, 2026 Many people in the Linux community began using the operating system—and contributing to open source—at a tender age, often well before their 16th birthday. Thus, a recent change in openSUSE's terms of site (ToS) that required users of the project's web site to be "at least 16 years of age or the age of majority" in their jurisdiction has raised objections. The terms have since been modified, though users must still have parental approval to create accounts if they are younger than 16. Must be 16 or older to enter The age restriction seems to have been added on March 10, 2026, according to the site's history.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at LWN.net (Linux Weekly News).