Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

> That's a distinction without a meaningful difference. if every member state in the EU is required to effectively set fire to F/OSS activities

They wouldn't do it. No seriously. The EU Commission has no effective enforcement mechanism to ensure countries actually implement the directives faithfully. The whole point of the marathon trilogues and engagement of the Council and Parliament is to get a draft text the member states are actually willing to implement faithfully. If a member state at this point already feels that they'll get push back from their national parliament then they have to keep renegotiating until they get something that will work. (Note: it's up to the member state to organise this feedback loop properly.)

So every national parliament gets to give its own twist to this and no national government is going to "set fire to F/OSS activities" as you put it. This will lead to about a decade of discussion and negotiation while all the kinks get sorted out. The problem with this kind of pioneering legislation is that it's really hard to think of all the corner cases up front and you're better off just doing the best you can and keeping the enforcement light while all the kinks get worked out.

> In other words, no matter what the CRA looks like when it finally passes, it's going to produce a massive mess that's going to take many, many years to coalesce into a meaningful set of rules that an individual [business] can use as a blueprint to stay out of trouble.

Welcome to the EU. We don't want to be a federation, so we do everything the hard way. The alternative, where every state does their own thing without any coordination, would be much much worse.