↳ In-reply-to » The EU's Proposed CRA Law May Have Unintended Consequences for the Python Ecosystem (as well as the entire free software movement).

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Many (most?) licenses in the world of free software explicitly deny any liability (is that how you say it in English? I think you know what I mean). So, if a user still uses that software for “potentially dangerous” things, who’s to blame? The software? Or the user?

We Germans always have to make an analogy with cars 😅, so here you go: If there’s a guy on the street offering you a car and he says, “oh, maybe it’ll drive, maybe it’ll explode, who knows – either way, the risk is yours, I’m just offering it”, you might still be interested in using that car for certain things. But you wouldn’t use it as an ambulance car or a taxi or whatever. Or you might actually do that after carefully inspecting it and/or fixing some things.

So, if there actually are any liability issues here in the current laws – I know nothing about that field, especially not when it comes to corporations –, I think this should be fixed at the user’s end. You run a hospital? Then there are certain standards for you and you’re liable for certain things. If that implies that you can no longer use, say, nginx, then that’s not nginx’s problem, but yours.

I would argue that you cannot hold programmers liable if they contribute to a free software project that is publicly available, because you don’t know how this software is going to be used.

(Plus, I have a hard time imagining how you as a programmer could prove that you’ve done a good job. What’s the criterium here? Clearly, it can’t be “no bugs ever”. So, what is it, “no damage above 1000 dollars” or something like that? What does the EU thingy say here?)