If some philanthropist were to give out free bicycles to everyone, but it turns out that unless you tighten a bolt one of the main support bars will likely snap and could even impale you, the government would rightfully go after them regardless of any "without warranty" disclaimer or EULA.
This is already well-trodden legal ground in the physical space; it's just a matter of bringing it into the virtual space.
Open source projects seldom get popular overnight. Responsibilities grow as you get more popular, that is all...
That is the GP example. If I make 1 bike by hand and put that somewhere on the street, and someone takes it and breaks their legs, that is not my fault. Nor should it be. If I sell that 1 bike, that can be another story.
It will kill open source imho as if you, in your underwear in the attic are responsible for some code you write and put on GitHub, you won't write that code anymore because of the risk; but I don't want to find out who is right here.
Responsibilities should befall the person deploying the software. Aka if you write some software and throw in on GitHub, that should not do anything. But if I take that software and put it in my app or backend and takes people's money because of some bug, then I am the one who is responsible. And this is already the case anyway. No changes are needed.
I think we agree though as I think we are talking about the person who writes and deploys/sells the software: they should indeed be responsible and already are.
Wow, the level of entitlement around open source is appalling. People download and run shit for free and get mad that they didn’t configure it right and want the government to go after the maintainers.
I can’t wait for the day where us open source devs have to contribute patches via pseudonyms and tor because they aren’t “government compliant”.