I continue to believe the risk is real and supported by my links and quotes. You might notice some people in the linked discussions who seem to be thinking it’s not entirely baseless. You’re free to disagree. I’m not a lawyer anyway.

I will stop discussing since suddenly this is about “normal” and I guess “abnormal” donations, and I don’t think we’re having a clear-headed debate here.

Did you actually read the quote I gave? I’m honestly confused.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ%3AL_202402847

Supply in the course of a commercial activity might be characterised not only by charging a price for a product with digital elements, but also by charging a price for technical support services where this does not serve only the recuperation of actual costs, by an intention to monetise, for instance by providing a software platform through which the manufacturer monetises other services, by requiring as a condition for use the processing of personal data for reasons other than exclusively for improving the security, compatibility or interoperability of the software, or by accepting donations exceeding the costs associated with the design, development and provision of a product with digital elements

TL;DR, just donations can already be a problem, apparently. But IANAL.

As far as I understand the license doesn’t matter at all for EU regulation, other than “non-free” software is treated even worse.

Generally if you give something away for free, you can’t be claimed to be the owner.

The CRA from what I can tell applies to software given away for free, sadly. I’m not a lawyer, though. But you can perhaps see why people don’t trust the EU.

I admit it’s a complex topic, but if you read the post in detail, it should answer your questions. The “owner” is typically the maintainer, if in doubt that’s the person with repository write access. And the EU can apparently potentially require whatever to be maintained, not that I understand the exact details. The point was that the regulation doesn’t seem to avoid FOSS fallout well.

The EU has been so far bad at making sure FOSS isn’t seen as a paid product in the eyes of 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.

Many of us dislike all the things you listed for their impact, including AI.

I think most people would argue 1-3% of datacenter use is still a significant global pollution factor that is a problem.

Does PeerTube have a better discovery algorithm than Mastodon? I have found simply tags and newest doesn’t work for me.

Does anybody know a Youtube that has videos about tech tinkering, crafting, and making art? I’ve tested out Odysee once, but at the time it was full of right-wing xenophobic stuff, which seemed to keep the creative crowd away. Also, Odysee was unusable from a slow mobile connection since it often didn’t offer a lower bitrate stream…

I didn’t find the exact same article, but this one makes pretty much the same claim: https://facia.ai/news/video-platforms-must-enforce-age-checks-or-face-massive-eu-fines/

A rolling back mechanism is the best thing to have for server tweaks. I achieve the same with docker. Something similar might be possible with FreeBSD Jails, podman, or anything similar like that. (Not that NixOS is a bad choice, I just wanted to share some more options for anybody looking for some to try.)

Right, but the article does. Anyway, I’m moving on. Thanks for the discussion.

But the article later does back it up: “Although Cloudflare singled out Google, other search engines that view AI search features as part of their search products also use the same bots for training as they do for search indexing.”

In any case, I’m okay with admitting neither you nor me can look inside Google to see they’re doing. But the claims are out there, I didn’t make them up, whether they’re true or not. Thank you for the certainly interesting Google crawler info link.

You look up what Googlebot does. No AI.

The page seems written to perhaps suggest it but doesn’t explicitly say the other bots can’t feed into some other sort of AI training. It would be in Google’s interest to mislead the users here.

Edit: I found a quote where it says Googlebot does both in one: “Google-Extended doesn’t have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Crawling is done with existing Google user agent […]” and I guess Cloudflare doesn’t trust Google to abide by the access controls. That seems sensible to me. Edit 2: What exactly the CEO believes was perhaps rightfully disputed below, it was just my guess.

Nothing on this page seems to contradict the article. But if I simply missed the part that does, I’d be happy to learn.

So what’s the quote from the documentation that backs up your claim? The line “perform other product specific crawls” seems extremely vague by design.

And allowing the public crawler might also have it feed their AI: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/

See here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ If you have a source that says it’s false, I’d be curious.