[jart]

The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.

[rlpb]

I don’t see how these principles could lead to people being restricted in the way you suggest.

[sunshine-o]

Yep you are basically describing the EU Cybersecurity Act if anybody care to read it and try to understand how things work in reality.

[immibis]

The CRA literally excludes free software developers from the obligations. Because if you're doing something for free you should have no obligations either. Instead, the obligations fall on commercial users of free software. Turns out regulations are sensible sometimes. Who knew.

However, this only happened because free software developers made an uproar about the act while it was a bill and was missing this provision. In a previous proposed version of the act, free software developers would have been liable for security vulnerabilities. So stay connected with politics!

[sunshine-o]

Yes, I believe the Eclipse Foundation and others lobbied for that.

But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk. In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky even for most ~100 employees companies.

So you still have the right to develop and use free software but you can't really make a living out of it anymore unless you work for RedHat or others.

And yes it makes no sense. The EU is doing to the software industry what they did to agriculture a few decades ago.

[immibis]

Is there a specific risk you're worried about, or just the general risk of doing something wrong that's inherent to all business and is typically mitigated by insurance and by using a limited liability company?

[sunshine-o]

So insurance did not offer much before the CRA. They will probably develop this market but it is gonna cost a lot probably and will be complex and imperfect.

Of course an LLC ultimately protect you but you have just multiplied by 10 or 100 the risk of blowing up your livelihood and the one of your employees.

Those regulations are just a nightmare, with "no-fault" liability, a simplified the burden of proof for the claimant, and are just very difficult to decrypt or applied to real world situations in an evolving landscape.

So unless you are big and have legal resources to work on it people are probably not gonna bother or give up.

Anyway your costs and risks have exploded and you are still competing with let's say Microsoft Azure.

[immibis]

Have you talked to an insurer? Business insurance requires a customized quote.

You didn't really answer the question. Do you have a specific risk in mind, or are you only worried about the risk of a random fuckup which all businesses face?

[otagekki]

Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source

[jart]

Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.

[otagekki]

I haven't read that book, but asked for a summary. Honestly, I cannot see software being regulated the same way as food industry is, for the very simple reason that software can trivially cross borders (legally or not) while food cannot. Regulating that industry to prevent any progress by erecting bureaucratic barriers in a given country will just kill the industry in that country and make it thrive elsewhere where it's less regulated. As a result, the regulation-freak country will lose any of its competitive advantages due to lesser efficiency.

Doing this on a global scale requires "CFC-ban"-levels of global coordination which I cannot see happening in the world we live in today. Just look at how global CO2 reduction and climate change is being handled today at the global scale.

[immibis]

This book is now on my reading list, but I expect it to be a crackpot book along the same lines of people who think COVID vaccine mandates are the same thing as Nazi Germany.

[throw__away7391]

This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.

[immibis]

All free (as in beer) work on software is voluntary. You do not need, and should not have, someone breathing down your neck to make you do it the way they want. However, that person is free to decide to allocate additional effort to work on the software themselves - even forking yours. They're also free to decide how much open source software they want to use, and which.

This is something I used to misunderstand too. That open source was something where there were a fixed set of projects available, one or two for each purpose, and if you wanted a change, you contributed that change and they take it. In reality, it's where everyone has their own project that does the thing they want. Most are written by one person or by tight-knit groups. Drive-by contributions often cost as much for the developers to process as just doing the contribution themselves. If you don't like how some software works, you have the right to write your own software using the existing software as a starting point - you do not have a right to edit the existing project. These are the same rights the UN has.