It's more like berries.

Holly bushes grow berries that you shouldn't eat.

Should government destroy all holly bushes? No. All berries? Certainly not.

Speech is a natural right and software is speech, so it can't be meaningfully viewed any other way, unless you're mindlessly parroting representative government deliberations.

i dont know, this sounds awfully seditious and terroristic.. better ship you to gitmo :)

> Why should FOSS be any different?

Because it's not a business. Health regulations for restaurants also don't apply to your kitchen at home, even if you are inviting friends for dinner.

And if FOSS is not a business, it's excluded from this regulation as well.

If you make business with said FOSS you need to provide security just like how a food truck making food from open recipes has to make sure to not poison people either.

What if I provide it for free and a business starts using it?

What if you give self baked cookies to a restaurant owner, and he sells them? Then the commercial entity assumes the risks and is supposed to safety check them.

They surely apply if they happen to get food poisoning and sue you afterwards.

Shockingly it's actually the fact you gave them food poisoning that decides that one. But I wouldn't be surprised if the Europeans thought that in need of fixing too.

It means that you haven't taken the proper care to prevent it from happening in first place.

There is a difference between being held accountable if your negligence ends up hurting someone vs. proactive audits and reporting requirements - the second has overhead even for those that already have high standards, overhead that is unreasonable outside a business setting.

Proactive audit system seems to be better one to me. It is more predictable - you know in advance which rules you are supposed to follow. It also allows for widely accepted risk standard know in advance to both customers and providers.

The "do what you want and we will punish you hard if luck strikes badly" is less predictable. It has unfair results. It leads to both excessive risk avoidance (because if you are unlucky punishment is disproportionate) and risk taking customer is unable to proactively avoid.

It should be different because software is different from physics objects like food, it works differently and people interact with it differently.

Imagine you were making cookies for your friends, and Nabisco happened to get one of the cookies somehow. Should you be responsible if they decide to use the ability, conferred from having one cookie, to create an infinite number of copies of that cookie (without checking it for defects or even really investigating it much) and start selling them across the country? I’d say probably not. But our legal framework doesn’t cover it, because physical objects don’t work like that, unlike software.

We could also look at software as more like a recipe. If Nabisco decided to copy my cookie recipe, they’d unambiguous be responsible for checking it and making sure it wasn’t actually poisonous. We also have cook books, I guess if you put a poisonous recipe in a cookbook you’d have some responsibility. But this is all manageable because cooking recipes are pretty short and easy enough to verify, and the foot-guns of the hobbyist cooking field are mostly well known.

A closer recipe analogy is probably — Nabisco probably gets their bulk supplies from a network of suppliers, who have to manage things like contamination levels and fitness for a given purpose. But now we’re hitting the point where the analogy is at least as complicated as the software supply network; I’m sure there are lots of shared responsibilities and regulations in that network, and it is all professionalized and for-profit.

Here in New Mexico, there's a whole class of food preparation (specifically, involving food that does not need refrigeration to stay "safe" for a specified time period) that is NOT subject to the same kind of health regulations as a restaurant.

It's one of the smartest laws I've seen in this area. Want to run a small coffee shack with some cakes, cookies etc? No need for a certified kitchen, "fully trained" cook, etc. The only thing you have to do is take a course that helps differentiate between refrigeration-required and no-refrigeration required food.

Interesting to think how this model would apply in the software context...

Restaurant regulations in EU do not mandate any special education for cooks. Also I don't know what you mean by "certified kitchen", it is not really a thing. There are regulations around handling and storing food, ventilation and what not in EU countries.

And those do apply to small stands and full kitchens. But if you want to claim they are unreasonable, then you should argue by existing ones rather then made up ones.

In the USA, to prepare food for commercial purposes, you generally need to have a kitchen that has been inspected and permitted for such things. You cannot, for example, use your own home kitchen (this varies by state, but that's generally true). Some states require training courses for all users of these kitchens (and some do not). Some require that the kitchen can only be used when someone trained is present.

I did not make anything up. The New Mexico law I mentioned went into effect only a few years ago. Before that, it would be illegal to, for example, bake a cake in your home kitchen and offer it for sale. This is no longer the case.