Who would support bad legislation? [LWN.net]

Who would support bad legislation?

Posted Dec 12, 2023 16:55 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Who would support bad legislation? by khim
Parent article: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

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 And this limitation on liability (including to released versions that have not been superseded - so Debian could trivially say that the "latest" version requires you to have taken everything in stable-updates for Debian to even be in scope for liability)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.

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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?