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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but that just means the EU will no longer be compatible with FOSS. FOSS runs the world, and Europe will find themselves without software to run the majority of their systems.

Without FOSS? No Internet. No business. No nothing. You'll have maybe 2/3rds of what ships in Windows and less than half of OSX. Oh, and no Ingenuity, which iirc was a joint NASA/ESA project.

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It will mean every server will have to use Microsoft Windows..... Thus, handing over all control over the EU networks to 1 American company.

Nope, Windows Server would be illegal in Europe. Microsoft ships too much non-trivial FOSS software in Windows now.

There is no major OS that they can run, nor can they develop for it (the act of installing GCC or LLVM would now be illegal, for example).

I'm pretty sure Microsoft could compile software in the US and export it without the compiler.

Other issues could be solved with a Microsoft Windows 11 EU Edition that only allows programs to be installed from the Microsoft store.

FOSS is shipped by Microsoft on the Microsoft store. It, too, would be illegal.

Microsoft can simply ban FOSS from its store.

It doesn't seem to actually go this far -- it means however that any repository for this free software, which can be obtained from the open repositories around the world, would need to have age verification in place. Meaning that in order to access all of this FOSS, there would be the cost of providing this filtered redistribution service. However it doesn't seem to suggest anyone would be afoul of the law for using a VPN to access it for themselves, likely undermining whatever funding model that service was providing.

It's frankly patently absurd all around.

The one amusing point though I suppose is the fact that Microsoft owns Github, and so while many repos could go ahead and say fine, we don't do business in the EU, Microsoft itself would be the company most impacted by this, as they would need to add in age verification for Github, not really having the easy option to just write off the EU as a bunch of technocratic lunatics.

Furthermore, it gets interesting when we consider cloud computing -- if a child has an AWS or Azure VPS, does this mean the cloud provider must do age verification before providing access to distribution provided repositories? There aren't many kids that are using text based protocols, and probably even fewer that are using finch's discord plugin to access perhaps a more popular platform among youth, but at the end of the day, these are provided.

And then there's the whole matter of web based IRC or other chat services.

Really, did they think about this at all?

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