Who would support bad legislation? [LWN.net]

Who would support bad legislation?

Posted Dec 12, 2023 11:22 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: EU situation should be looked at by everyone by b7j0c
Parent article: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Big companies might support these laws because compliance is easier for big companies than small companies. (If the user needs to know that the software they use has a valid "self assessment" certificate, they might be happier getting all their software from one big, famous company instead of a variety of different, smaller companies.)

Small companies sometimes support the idea of these laws if they've only been told of the positives (you'll get software that's more secure) and haven't been told of the negatives (there'll be less software, and specifically less free software).

Same for consumer groups, if they've been told consumers will get software that's more secure but haven't been told that there will be less software, less choice, less competition and less ability for users to get involved in the direction in which software is being developed.

And companies who are competing against free software companies will like these laws if they're written in a way so that compliance is extra difficult if your development model is multi-stakeholder, available to the public at all times, and allows multiple companies to commercialise the same software.

(In the EU, when we saw the original proposal we thought "ha, no one will like this, we'll build a broad coalition and get it fixed". When we actually talked to other sectors, indeed, we were surprised to find organisations cheering for it - including ones who will actually be harmed by it.)

Who would support bad legislation?

Posted Dec 12, 2023 13:02 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

Firstly, it's not at all obvious that less software is a negative in and of itself; being able to choose between 1,000,000 software packages, all of which are defective and thus do not solve the problem they purport to solve without creating more problems than it solves is not obviously better than a world in which I have 3 packages to choose from, all of which solve the problem in front of me without creating new problems for me to solve. I would prefer to be in the latter world rather than the former, and liability rules are how you move from the former to the latter in a market economy.

Secondly, implicit in the assertion that this will affect Free software more than it affects proprietary software is a claim that proprietary software is inherently (by virtue of being proprietary) less likely to be defective than Free software; can you back this claim up?

Who would support bad legislation?

Posted Dec 12, 2023 16:23 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> Secondly, implicit in the assertion that this will affect Free software more than it affects proprietary software is a claim that proprietary software is inherently (by virtue of being proprietary) less likely to be defective than Free software; can you back this claim up?

No, the difference is not in number of defects. If it were that simple then Free software would have been less affected than proprietary software.

Most studies show that free software has smaller number of defects.

But proprietary software development process naturally involves formal agreements and lots of money! Debian gets maybe 1 million USD per year (or maybe even less?) while Google collects 40-50 billion USD from Google Play store yearly.

That approximately five orders of mangnitude difference!

Sure, Debian has many times smaller number of users, too… but difference is not 100'000 times!

Who would support bad legislation?

Posted Dec 12, 2023 16:55 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, but you only face liability if your software is defective; for the amount of Free software to fall by a higher proportion than the amount of proprietary software as a result of products containing software having liability, you'd have to have a world where the latest version of any piece of Free software is more likely to be defective than the latest version of any piece of proprietary software. And this limitation on liability (including to released versions that have not been superseded - so Debian could trivially say that the "latest" version requires you to have taken everything in stable-updates for Debian to even be in scope for liability) balances out the relative sizes of the two operations.

Who would support bad legislation?

Posted Dec 12, 2023 17:00 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

This may work fine for Debian, but there are lots of spin-offs that don't follow “best practices” and don't update their distros for months or even years.

Thus we may be pretty sure open source would be affected by these laws… but would that necessarily be negative influence?

If all these distros-of-the day when someone collects some free software, slaps their name on the pile and publishes as “new OS”… if these would disappear, would that really be a bad thing?