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/