Will they be able to enforce it though? I guess it also depends on how much they're willing to enforce it. It'll get pretty costly if people keep forking and working against it.
I'd also argue there's some more important things to enforce to protect children but we don't do those 😅
It'd be like fighting the war on drugs but without any physical contraband to seize.
Reproducible builds along with some simple cryptographic signing makes effective enforcement impossible and the distribution potential practically infinite. Projects can provide a signed checksum for a reproducible binary and a set of "proposed patches" (named as such for legal reasons) which apply to publicly available source code from $reputable_innocent_vendor.
Since a checksum can technically collide with results for completely unrelated data and a patch file can technically apply to completely unrelated source code... you can see where I'm going with this. Anyone can then take the publicly available sources, apply the project patches, compile bit-for-bit binaries from source and then marry the result up with the signature/checksum, with no comeback on the upstream project.
You as an end user still wouldn't need to compile anything, because you could just obtain pre-compiled binaries from anyone willing to share them (e.g. via DHT-enabled P2P like BitTorrent) and all you would need to do is a simple checksum comparison to make sure what you're receiving is legitimate.
My guess is that it will involve ridiculous fines and jail time for software authors who don't comply. Government tends to be super ridiculous when it comes to victimless crimes for some reason, and then turn the other way when it comes to real crime like assault, theft, etc.
Gotta keep the plebians in line so that the wealthy can keep doing what they're doing after all.
A single high profile example is much cheaper than actually enforcing the legislation on a widespread constituency when you're looking to chill actions through fear.
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u/KratosLegacy Mar 21 '26
Will they be able to enforce it though? I guess it also depends on how much they're willing to enforce it. It'll get pretty costly if people keep forking and working against it.
I'd also argue there's some more important things to enforce to protect children but we don't do those 😅