Briar is hard to regulate because of it having no server, hence I was wondering: are they an alternative to whatever the EU is doing with general messaging apps?
I don’t think that’s how the legal minded people think.
They’ll just go after the developers, force the program abandoned and illegal.
Technically or legally?
They just won’t comply. These FOSS services never have to worry about the law anyway - there are literal piracy sites, lol
FOSS is fucked either way in EU starting end 2027 because of CRA.
EU, the entity that couldn’t make a functioning TODO app given a couple million EUR budget, is regulatory killing computing, software and digital communications.
Elborate?
I replied in a sister comment.
Thank you for replying
Isn’t FOSS excluded from CRA. Why should it be fucked?
It isn’t, the license you publish your code under has no relation to whether or not the regulation applies.
For example I develop a small opensource (GPL) application, for which I do paid support. Because of the paid support, it’s interpreted as a commercial activity. Without the paid support, I can’t spend time on the project. I used to see it as a way to have the large users subsidise the project for all. Turns out it’s a huge liability instead.
So I’ll have to abandon the project when the law comes into effect. It’ll be easier to rewrite it closed source as an employee for those companies, for they do have a legal department.
