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> If the proposed law is enforced as currently written, the authors of open-source components might bear legal and financial responsibility for the way their co
by 2rsf 4y ago
> If the proposed law is enforced as currently written, the authors of open-source components might bear legal and financial responsibility for the way their components are applied in someone else’s commercial product.
Oh shit, this is huge. I wonder if it applies retroactively for code in the wild, as an open source contributor you can't recollect you code back.
- canadiantim 4y agoIf true and enforced that would be the death of the open-source community as we know it
- tensor 4y agoIn the EU at least. No doubt disclaimers would go up on all source repositories that access from the EU is forbidden.
- josephcsible 4y agoHow many more laws like this one need to get passed for people to stop saying Brexit was the worst thing that could have happened to the UK?
- ben_w 4y agoDepends on the people you want to stop saying it. There's people like me, who moved from the UK to Germany as a direct reaction to Brexit. I don't have a Boolean heaven-or-hell (Devon-or-Hull?) attitude to any of this — Brexit itself was stupid, but not (yet) the worst thing the Westminster government did to United Kingdom people. Sure, a repeat of the Potato Famine may happen, but probably not. Then you've got people who have made it part of their identity. On both sides, they're never going to admit the possibility of Team Them making the slightest of mistakes. For example, the specific mistake of the government passing a law that allowed a regional ambulance service to find out the preceding 6 months of internet domains accessed by any person, without any need for a warrant; something that was obviously not compatible with the Human Rights obligations but which the government passed anyway, and as that government was loudly conflating the EU with the human rights courts, I just assumed they'd force it into effect regardless of any objection I could bring, when they actually managed to leave the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016 "Less bad" isn't automatically perfect (the topic of this discussion may be an example of such an imperfection), but it is less bad.
- 908B64B197 4y ago> the government passing a law that allowed a regional ambulance service to find out the preceding 6 months of internet domains accessed by any person, without any need for a warrant Wow. And people voted in favor of that? No wonder we're flooded with resumes from the UK over here...
- ben_w 4y agoI still don't know why they even asked for that power; the arguments given at the time were predicable clichés that had about as much connection to reality as the average stock photo of a hacker — if I assume they were sincere then they must have been incompetent, and if competent then insincere. https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/80 https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/80
- flangola7 4y agoThe only reason there's a possibility Brexit isn't the worst thing is the large pool of competitively bad things.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y agoIn case you hadn't noticed, this law hasn't been passed. It is currently out for consultation through a relatively transparent process. Certainly more transparent than the, let's all meet at the club and thrash it out between us, what what, process that takes place in Westminster under the current lot. This is how democracy is supposed to work, but alas very few people take the time to learn that or engage in the actual process.
- benhurmarcel 4y agoMaybe don't base your opinion of the EU on some speculative HN comments about a non-voted law proposal?
- SkyBelow 4y agoIf the EU is willing to hold you financially liable for something you provided for free with no promise of it functioning or being safe to use, might they also hold you financially liable even though you said it shouldn't be used by anyone in the EU?
- FredPret 4y agoMaybe the safest approach is to firewall them off of the internet. They can have their own bureaucratic paradise without involving the rest of us in their mad schemes.
- sclarisse 4y agoI mean, the newspapers already do that with the GDPR regulations, so it may be inevitable
- FredPret 4y agoPersonally I modified my (paid service) project's EULA to make it unavailable to EU residents, citizens, and people currently located there just to be safe. First it was fonts and cookies, now this; I don't want to see where this jaw-dropping progression ends up. In 2016 I thought Britain was absolutely mad, but they're starting to look smarter and smarter
- cronix 4y agoI wonder how much collective time the world would save not having to click on cookie permissions every time they visit a website.
- jart 4y agoMaxMind has a free utility called GeoIpLite that has an explicit field which tells you if an IP address should be considered part of the EU.
- FredPret 4y ago
- noworriesnate 4y agoWhat about extradition treaties? Do I need to be concerned about someone in Europe misusing my mathematical expression parser library in a medical device, people die, and then I get extradited? I heard a third-hand story about a Boeing engineer held responsible for an aircraft crash in China, and the US was going to extradite him to China. He committed suicide. Don't know if it was true, although it was a Boeing employee who told me about it, and she certainly thought it was true.
- Jtsummers 4y agoThe US doesn't have an extradition treaty with China, so that's probably an urban legend or someone pulling your leg or trying to put the fear of god (China?) into her and other engineers so they take the job seriously.
- octacat 4y agoPretty much that. After GDPR many small shops refused to work with EU IP addresses and just redirect to a page with some disclaimer. But big players (who were consulting politicians when GDPR regulations were written) only won from GDPR, they don't need to show the cookies banner all the time on their platforms and still have a lot of power over your private data. Certification of software is always expensive, so expect new open source licenses: "Open source as usual, but if you are from EU, you are not allowed to use that code". Or expect Amazon to take an open source product, close source their fork, do certification and provide SAAS. Again, there are companies who can do some commercial support for their code, but they are really could not be interested in adopting all the EU regulations.
- xeromal 4y agoI'm sure repos would just block access to European IP address if the maintainer requests it.
- mrweasel 4y agoIt would also absolutely destroy the EU economy. Developers in the EU would be blocked from PyPi, GitHub, NPM, Stack Overflow and much much more. Pretty much every single commercial software product contains at least one open source package. You wouldn't even be able to use Java or .Net. There's also no way in hell that commercial companies like Oracle or Microsoft will assume any kind of responsibility for errors their code would result in in a customers code base. At least not without massive compensation. And how about Linux, or Android... or iOS, they contain open source software as well. Could you go after some random kernel developer for a bug that affects Android? This hasn't been tought through in any way, the ramifications could be enormous.
- estebarb 4y agoAt some point would be cheaper to just block access from whole Europe than complying with their laws. The worst part is that a lot of politicians in other countries are just copying the EU tech legislation, instead of trying to produce something better.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoSo every 2 weeks i read posts like this, 'Company X will just quit" if they have to pay tax/comply with some law/ follow basic decency But it never happens. The only example is Google leaving China because of authoritarianism. And now they are back. Maybe it can happen to a tiny country. But do you actually imagine that the entire 17 trillion economy of EU will be left without software? Companies do not 'just quit' huge markets. They don't leave money on the table.
- estebarb 4y agoBig companies obviously no. But a bootstrapped startup? Probably yes, at least initially. And here we are not talking about "basic decency" or taxes. The audit requirements by the new EU law are extremely expensive. They assume that every software developer is BigCo. I don't see that the EU is requesting every tabloid article to be fully audited to remove false claims or that each medical decision must be audited. The requirement is disproportional.
- josefx 4y agoThis thing wont be fairly enforced until the ISO is fined $50 Googol for publishing the C spec. .
- oaiey 4y agoWho invented null again? I need an address for the lawyers.
- green7ea 4y ago| I call my billion-dollar mistake. It was | the invention of the null reference in 1965. | | -- Tony Hoare It might turn into a real billion-dollar mistake, not just a metaphorical one...
- ben_w 4y agoMr Nüll Null St 0°N, 0°E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_van_der_Nüll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_van_der_Nüll (I assume this is a record error) https://goo.gl/maps/fDEbp5ymtTiYPMKZA https://goo.gl/maps/fDEbp5ymtTiYPMKZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
- lelanthran 4y agoThe address of null is zero, obviously
- Asmod4n 4y agoYou can potentially hold those responsible who published the first open source TCP/IP stack for anything happening on the internet if it retroactively applies to existing code, fun times.
- Gud 4y agoThe first TCP/IP stack was actually open source(before the term even existed). Written by Bill Joy(and maybe others) of Vi, Sun and BSD fame.