On 2022-08-17 09:08, doug demaio wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
Just because something is open source doesn’t enable its use to skirt the laws of the lands And some countries make really stupid laws And some countries enforce them stupidly It’s a minefield, but one we navigate daily and have navigated for years.
I can respect that point of view. I don't agree with it. History is filled with reasons for change by those who are labeled rebels; those who did not conform to the stupidity. Whether right or wrong, this mentality creates change needed to not remain stagnate.
The only question this incident raises for me is a casual pondering as to whether we will need to treat cryptocurrency tools in a similar way to “hacking” tools, patented codecs, and libdvdcss and keep them out of openSUSE to avoid legal entanglements.
This is a discussion that needs or should happen. Guess I'll start. If I'm running a bitcoin node via flatpak on a Tumbleweed machine and it's processing the less than 1% criminal activity [1] on the bitcoin network, is their a problem? Should we now start to consider having tools that prevent certain flatpaks from being used on our distros?
[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/
That’s not really a relevant question for the openSUSE Project mailing list The openSUSE project doesn’t distribute any Flatpaks Distributors have responsibilities - As demonstrated by GitHubs actions fulfilling their obligations under law in this case. A more relevant question would be “Should we block RPMs, Disk Images, or other media we do build, from OBS/our repos that contain software that is primarily used for activity that the relevant authorities (DE plus UK plus US) consider illegal?” But I’m not sure that’s even a question that needs answering, obvious established precedent in this Project is “yes”, we don’t allow such software on our infra and we don’t distribute it, even if it’s open source. And I don’t think we should change that approach. If the laws are wrong, the countries in question need to change them, but that’s a political battle to be conducted on a broad front with broad support. And I don’t think the large amount of illegal moneylaundering which the app in question here was clearly used for here really endears it as the rallying call for such a fight.