↳ 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

Yeah, we probably have to agree to disagree here.

I still think it would be better to put the burden of liability on the users – no matter if they’re private individuals or big companies. (And isn’t that already the case? Do we even have to solve a legal liability problem? Not talking about software quality here, that’s a whole other issue.)

Trust me, if people got sued or went to jail, the tech industry would figure out really fast how to make these determinations.

Yeah, they would. It’s simple: No more free software, no more publicly available projects. The only software that would ever exist is software made by large corporations who can afford the appropriate insurances and lawyers.

What you’re proposing is either classifying software in advance as “dangerous” or “harmless” (I’d argue that’s impossible – as an extreme, think of libraries, they’d all be “potentially dangerous”), or threatening free software projects with lawsuits if, at some point in the future, these projects caused an accident.

Why would anyone publish free software or contribute to it under these conditions?

Why should open source software development be any different?

IMHO because you can make software publicly available and anyone can use it for whatever they want, which the author has zero control over.

Anyway, have a good night, I’m gonna enjoy a couple of movies now. 👋 😊