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by ctrw 779 days ago
>Third, if and when software liability becomes law and covers open source software included in a product, then companies will finally invest substantially in the open source software ecosystem.

This is delusional. Companies will stop releasing open source a software if it cost them money to do it. It is already enough of a fight to just get legal to sign off for ip reasons. If accounting got involved it would simply never happen.

2 comments

As mentioned in the article: something like 80% of the code shipped is open source, due to developers doing the reasonable thing and including OSS libraries.

Companies can't just walk away from 80%. And if there's liability, rip and replace becomes rip, replace, and still fix issues -- versus just leaving out the rip and replace steps.

They can and they will because they did it once moving to open source in the first place.
The majority of the article is about providing counterpoints to the statements in the first paragraphs

> Counterclaim #3: Software liability laws will not necessarily lead to broad corporate investment in the open source software ecosystem.