Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer <perezmeyer@gmail.com> writes: ... > Just to be clear: I also do agree with the main intention of the > proposal, what I do not like is that the current draft wording might > backfire on us. I'd expect the multinationals, who have large legal teams, and are used to interacting with the EU, to find various ways of ensuring that they can continue to avoid responsibility for their (often-shoddy) wares. They seem to treat legal fees and fines as costs of doing business, so won't be significantly inconvenienced. Meanwhile, one could imagine something like the BSA going around looking to see if vendors of Free Software based systems have sold anything into the EU, and encouraging the EU authorities to audit them, just to crap on the competition. I remember MS signing-up UK schools to per-processor site licenses where if one offered to give a school 100 refurbished laptops running Debian, they'd often end up saying no because they couldn't afford the extra Windows/Word licenses that they'd have to pay for if they allowed those CPUs on site. I'm sure there are still people being paid by incumbents to come up with ways of maintaining market share by whatever means, who are perfectly capable of weaponising this legislation against new entrants -- and that seems very likely to include people associated with Free Software. Do we really want the likes of Purism to refuse to ship into the EU in future? I think that seems quite likely to be a rational response on the part of small enterprises where the bulk of their market lies elsewhere. I'd love for the vendors of crappy software to be held accountable for the endless plague of viruses, and the Internet of Shit, they're inflicting on the world, but I suspect that it won't work out that way. Instead, I worry that it will only touch people that are trying much harder to do a good job, but cannot afford a full-time lobbying team in Brussels. Cheers, Phil. -- Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil
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