Under no circumstances should we be “mandating” how hobbyists write their software. If you want to scope this to commercial OSes, be my guest. That’s not what was done here.

I'm not sure where the line between "hobby" and "professional" lies when it comes to linux distributions. Many of them are nonprofit but not really hobbyist at this point. Debian sure feels like a professional product to me (I daily drive it).

We regulate how a hobbyist constructs and uses a radio. We regulate how a hobbyist constructs a shed in his yard or makes modifications to the electrical wiring in his house.

I think mandating the implementation of strictly device local filtering based on a standardized HTTP header (or in the case of apps an attached metadata field) would be reasonably non-invasive and of benefit to society (similar to mandating USB C).

> I'm not sure where the line between "hobby" and "professional" lies when it comes to linux distributions. Many of them are nonprofit but not really hobbyist at this point. Debian sure feels like a professional product to me (I daily drive it).

"Professional" means you're being paid for the work. Debian is free (gratis), contributors are volunteers, and that makes it not professional.

What about Ubuntu? Its a combination of work by volunteers and paid employees, it is distributed by a commercial company, and said company sells support contracts, but the OS itself is free.

And there are developers who are paid to work on various components of linux from the kernel, to Gnome, does that make it professional?

Is Android not professional, because you don't pay for the OS itself, and it is primarily supported by ad revenue?

I would argue they're not, because they're not fully under the responsibility of a commercial entity, because they're open source. Companies can volunteer employees to the project, even a project they started themselves, but the companies and employees can come and go. Open source projects exist independently as public goods. Ultimately, it just takes anyone in the world to fork a project to exclude everybody else from its development.

Mint started off as Ubuntu. Same project, with none of the support contracts, no involvement from Canonical needed at the end of the day, etc.

On a practical level, it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers whatever the case may be with regards to the employment of other contributors.

At some point it seems to devolve from a meaningful discussion about how things should be done into a semantic argument (which are almost always pointless).

> it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers

I agree when it comes to individuals. But it probably does make sense to hold formally recognized groups (such as nonprofits) accountable to various consumer laws. I think the idea odd that Windows, RHEL, Ubuntu, and Debian should all be regulated differently within a single jurisdiction given that they seem to me largely equivalent in purpose.

You've confused and confabulated like 11 different things there. None of what you said has anything to do with either what I said or what the law says.

The way this currently exists is basically unenfoceable because the critical terms are not even defined. It's not even ultimately intelligible, which is a prerequisite to enforcing, or even being able to tell where it does and does not apply, and whether some covered entity is or is not in compliance.