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[return to "Open source liability is coming"]
1. sevagh+F6[view] [source] 2023-12-29 18:40:30
>>daniel+(OP)
I find this article and the reactions here confusing. This seems to me like unequivocally a good thing for open-source devs.

Making commercial vendors who rely on open source software liable for bugs is fantastic news, that's how it always should have been. You can't have a commercial company throw their hands up and say "well github.com/cutefuzzypuppy is at fault for writing an open-source npm package we used so harm to our customers is not our fault!"

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2. rebecc+Ca[view] [source] 2023-12-29 18:57:03
>>sevagh+F6
I think that this part of it could break either way, but the concern is that when faced with a choice between being liable for their own code or being liable for open source code, most companies will choose to write their own code. If so, that would be a net harm to open source and user freedom. I'm not sure it'll happen, but it might.

The biggest issue I see with this law is around liability for open source projects that people are using directly. It'll be disastrous if all open source software ceases to exist or be available in Europe because volunteers face legal liability if their code has a bug. In theory this could even impact people outside of Europe if they don't prohibit access to their code by EU citizens.

I release a lot of code on github. Most of it is just random crap that I wrote to solve a specific need or to explore an idea, and I put it up under an open source license because why not? If it helps someone, that's great. Now I need to be concerned that the random "example-service" project I wrote in C and published a decade ago to go with a blog post I wrote will end up costing me all the money I have ever or will ever earn in my career.

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3. chatma+us[view] [source] 2023-12-29 20:38:59
>>rebecc+Ca
Writing their own code is not mutually exclusive with open sourcing it. Arguably it might even be safer to open source it, since more eyes will be on the code looking for bugs.

Some of the biggest open source projects are owned by megacorps, like React (Facebook), TypeScript (Microsoft), and Tensorflow (Google). And it's clear from these examples that their stewardship has wrought benefits for both the company and the community. The company benefits from what would otherwise be their internal tooling becoming an industry standard - Facebook doesn't need to train React devs after hiring them. And the code is more robust as more people use it - Microsoft doesn't even need to use its latest TypeScript version, they can just wait for the community to test it for them...

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