> The Act's stance on donations, even from non-commercial sources, could inadvertently discourage larger contributions. And an organization that develops open source may be disincentivized to release projects as OSS or contribute to OSS in the first place. After all, the CRA would just increase the legal risk of open sourcing a project, incentivizing companies to keep more software proprietary and closed.
If this passes in current form, we will have less open source software. A lot of such software is available in community and enterprise versions. The community versions will become a liability. You have to take extra expenses and a legal risk (5 million minimum) for... mostly nothing.
Who the hell will pay for Linux kernel audits? Nobody earns money from Linux kernel directly. Most people use free distributions, will they be banned, will you have to shove money into Red Hat (aka IBM these days) mouth?
Europe Commision either doesn't understand it, or they understand it and do it on purpose/don't care. Most people who support it don't understand software either and treat it as a hardware, or an Amazon package. Stop. Software, especially OSS, doesn't work like that. And without the competition from OSS, oh boy, believe me, you will used like in the "good" old IE only Microsoft EEE days.
I'm a European citizen, by the way, and I'm not happy about the EU in recent times, especially the Commision. This combined with Chat Control...
Software is (was?) where you could go from 0 to something by yourself. This will end it. You don't go to a million in a day. If you earn several hundreds in a month, having a 5 million liability just doesn't make sense. That's 5 LIFETIMES of income in my area. This will be considered as speculation, but I think that is the point of this. Big boys only. I don't believe Commision is stupid.
There are people who are congratulating giving up individual freedoms... This makes me feel depressed...
Isn't that the idea? Regulatory capture [1] entrenches the existing players while keeping out would-be competitors. The proposed law won't affect Big Tech, but will affect small to medium-sized businesses.