Sure keeping your head down is always a smart choice. But willfully living at the whims of capricious bureaucrats? Given the choice I'd prefer to not have that sword of Damocles in play.

Taking GDPR as an example, it shows that enforcement is done in proportion to the size of the corporation. Big corporations get fined, smaller companies receive warnings

If there are tangible harms, why have judicial institutions not entertained civil suits? If there are tangible harms, yet the institutions have not entertained civil suits, could it be that malign incentives are already in play?

Would you trust voters in your locality to vote on how you create your next software project? Shall we vote on what you eat for lunch?

Ultimately these discussions boil down to our core premises. Doubtful either of us will convince the other to change those.

I can understand why some people are worried when looking at how many governmental institutions have failed in their duty to serve the public. The EU has definitely got its share off bad decisions, but overall I think it has a good track

Politically I'd probably identify myself as an anarchist, so if I could change the world to look exactly like I thought best, I'd probably get rid of nation states and governments all together

That's however not how the world works and I'd rather work with the tools I have available right now

There's a war going on not far away from where I live and cyber attacks against critical infrastructure are happening almost daily

Even on this site, where I think discussions are generally pretty civilised, I'm starting to see a lot of retoric that's suspiciously similar to the alt-right retoric in many other places of the the web

It makes me think that there's a growing number of users here on this site who are only here to further their political agenda of authoritarianism and violence

That scares me much more than having to make sure that the code I write doesn't have security vulnerabilities

I think it's worth considering what actions can be taken to preserve society the best under these circumstances (society is different from government and states in this context)

>Politically I'd probably identify myself as an anarchist, so if I could change the world to look exactly like I thought best, I'd probably get rid of nation states and governments all together

For me it doesn't matter if the final stop is minarchism or ancaptistan. Steps towards either are an improvement. Bureaucrats regulating software development isn't it.

>Alt-right...

Maybe you could be more specific here? There was recently an article and video submitted here which accused Murray Rothbard of being a "right-wing extremist". It was yet another sloppily argued anti-cryptocurrency hit piece. Similarly we can call anarchists of all flavors extremists. The term alt-right or extremist is mostly a scare word from my perspective. It is hard to find meaning behind it.

>It makes me think that there's a growing number of users here on this site who are only here to further their political agenda of authoritarianism and violence

>Authoritarianism...

Isn't an authority dictating which kinds of software you may publish authoritarian by definition?

>That scares me much more than having to make sure that the code I write doesn't have security vulnerabilities

Agreed 100%, authoritarianism and individual autonomy is a bigger concern. Which is why I'm not a fan of these regulations. Furthermore, I suspect most users here already put forth an effort to avoid security issues.

In the US there is a bureau called the EPA. When polluters pollute within the guidelines, they have no liability. Perhaps now that software development is regulated we will see similar protections for incompetence.

You seem to mix the purpose of the Commission with that of the Council of the European Union, which is a body that has the power to make decisions. It consists of elected representatives from member states

The European Parliament, which is again all elected representatives, makes decisions that the Commission must implement, not the other way around

The Commission are the ones who draws up proposals and that they hope the Parliament will pass

Please educate yourself on this, as this kind of misinformation is undermining trust in the democratic process

The EU institutions pretty regularly do things that hurt the economy in order to prioritize their own political or social goals, so that doesn't mean much.

That is a very rose-tinted view of EU regulators. Europeans are people like everywhere else on the planet, we're not somehow immune to regulatory capture (though I feel it might help the institutions that we haven't yet powerful blocs like the GOP that set out to destroy any kind of regulation in order to prove it's infeasible). Heck, German industry giants are practically married to the state here, there's absolutely no fucking way a company like VW or Opel will go under if a rich government like Germany can do anything about it.

More to the point, the author themself is pro-CRA for a range of things that seem to have purely positive effects, as they spell out quite clearly in the article. The points brought up are nevertheless important: we shouldn't be okay with legislator making objectively shitty laws devoid of any technical comprehension or economical realism and hope it'll kinda be fine when the bureaucracy and courts actually implement it. Just having the danger of having to pay 15M€ for my open source project because it might be used commercially is a horrendous imposition.

Looking at the history of GDPR fines, big corporations have been fined large amounts, small companies have gotten warnings

Given that legal precedence I think saying that open-source maintainers risk 15M euro fines is blowing things out of proportion

And for a small open source project, a 500€ fine is enough to make development and publication unattractive, a percentage of a devs yearly income is painful, and tens of thousands of Euros would be dangerous to the long-term financial well-being of the developers. Even if the fines are a lot lower than 15M€, this proposal stays shit as written.