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by mort96 1235 days ago
This isn't in relation to either the chat control law or the cyber resilience act, I haven't read either proposal in enough detail to have a strong opinion on them. But I want to comment on the "sucking the fun out of professional software development" part.

Should we expect professional software development to be fun? There's a lot of laws out there which arguably "suck the fun out of" civil engineering, but I certainly appreciate the fact that there are standards in place to try to keep bridges, tunnels and buildings from collapsing.

Maybe it's not the worst idea in the world to have enforced engineering standards for the digital built environment like we have for the non-digital built environment, and treat it less like a playground where programmers can do whatever they want?

Just a thought, I don't have very strong opinions on this topic.

1 comments

> Maybe it's not the worst idea in the world to have enforced engineering standards for the digital built environment like we have for the non-digital built environment

If you're building infrastructure control systems, sure.

But for software that "enable human-to-human communication"?

Do we have engineering standards for printing out pamphlets, teaching foreign languages, inventing board games, writing a song?

Obviously the standards should be in concordance with how critical the infrastructure is. I thought that went without saying. I'm just trying to ask if we should expect working on critical infrastructure to be "fun" and not burdened by regulations.
Yea, I wouldn't have a problem with that regulation if it would be applied to only these critical areas. But it seems that they want to apply this directive to all software that's sold in the EU.

To be fair, I haven't read the actual draft, just read some reporting about the implications for open source software.