it's basically the government said "no asbestos in food" and some contrarians set up a website selling asbestos food, except not really because they don't have a product.
it's basically the government said "no asbestos in food" and some contrarians set up a website selling asbestos food, except not really because they don't have a product.
> it's basically the government said "no asbestos in food" and some contrarians
it's actually the government saying "you must include salt in your food" and a few people who cook dinner at home and don't care for salt set up a website teaching you how to desalinate your... (well, there's no direct continuation of the metaphor here, but the point is it's very important that this is not the government banning a developer from implementing something, it is them mandating a developer implement something. That's far more troubling than an "asbestos ban" as in "your open source project must not fry the computers it runs on," which is equally questionable in light of "no warranty expressed or implied" but a totally different ballgame from "this API is required")
It's the government saying "you must put fluoride in tap water" and a few people making a big fuss about selling unfluoridated water
If we insist on stretching this absurd metaphor, the government would be issuing civil penalties to "water distributors" who provide water without the requisite floridation, where "water distributors" includes not just Aquafina for selling bottled water, but also the lemonade stand the kids set up in front of the house and you, in your home kitchen, serving your house guests water from your reverse-osmosis private reserve.
It seems metaphor is important to you, so hopefully this thoroughly illustrates the insanity of this law.
The point is there are no carve outs (for open source). Your toy operating system is just as liable as Microsoft to implement this. In the real world, the health department does not require your home cocktail hour beverages to meet industrial water supply mineralization standards.
Perhaps you believe that analogue is "a few people raising a stink" because you don't really believe the "health department" would go after my "little open source water faucet." But the way the law is written, there's nothing stopping them. And none of us want to be the test case. And that's not even getting into the whole "compelled speech" problem, but I'm going to have to leave that line of argument to someone else to analogize.
> Your toy operating system is just as liable as Microsoft to implement this. In the real world
Is it? It's consumer product law, so it only applies to commercially available stuff, if not only commercially sold stuff