Comment on Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates
Buffalox@lemmy.world 11 hours agorather than add burden to OS makers
It’s not a burden for the OS maker, except when the OS is the product, and in that case it’s only fair.
With Android the phone maker adapt the OS to their phones and flavor of Android, if they can’t handle maintaining it, they can use vanilla. Google is the OS maker, and I think they can handle the burden.
ell1e@leminal.space 10 hours ago
The EU has been so far bad at making sure FOSS isn’t seen as a paid product for regulation, even in cases where it’s clearly unpaid, see here. They can’t be trusted to get this differentiation right.
Therefore, unlockable bootloader seems like the better idea. Get people to Linux and open Android variants if the closed-source companies won’t serve them.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I have no idea what I’m supposed to see from you link, I don’t see any particular knowledge, or description of any particular legal consequences.
Obviously software provided for free “as is”, cannot be required to be maintained. And 9if it is owned by the public which is the case with FOSS, there is no “owner” who can be made responsible.
ell1e@leminal.space 8 hours ago
If you read the post in detail, it should answer your questions. The “owner” always exists and is typically the maintainer, if in doubt that’s the person with repository write access.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Nope, AFAIK that is not legally applicable, that is very clear with licenses like MIT BSD etc, and for GPL in all versions it’s very explicitly stated in the license.
You can also release as simply public domain, which very obviously means nobody owns as it is owned by everybody.
Generally if you give something away for free, you can’t be claimed to be the owner.
I have no idea where that idea should come from, some typical anti EU alarmists maybe? And I bet there is zero legal precedent for that. And I seriously doubt any lawyer would support your claim.
If however you choose a license where the creator keeps ownership it may be different, but then it’s not FOSS.