Nope, they only need to uphold to the same standards.
The guy selling food on the street has the same liability as a restaurant.
The guy selling food on the street has the same liability as a restaurant.
Maybe you could make the case that he was following best industry practices in doing so; after all, using Valgrind is a best practice, right? But you could also pretty plausibly convince a jury that he was negligent. Especially if you're IBM's senior counsel. Or, say, RSA's.
Now, is Kurt Roeckx or RSA going to be advising the US legislators who draft this candidate legislation, establishing the standards that they both must uphold?
If someone gets run down by a bicycle that a hobby repair shop failed to fix, it doesn't matter it was done for free by a guy that learned to repair bicycles during late nights.
But yes, lawmakers will decide, and given that they for instance try to de facto prohibit aftermarket OpenWRT installs, I have a guess how they would decide.
The company selling me a car is responsible to validate the security of each piece they got from a third party, and a restaurant is responsible to take care for the quality of the food it buys from the local bazar.
When the wise must obey the commands of the foolish, disaster ensues.
The law makers cannot make the internet safer by one bit. Technical experts can and lawyers would dream to have leverage against them. They should be denied.
It is about minimizing risk and it is a process that acknowledges that risk cannot be removed completely. It just forces you to work carefully and eliminates neglectful practices.
No serious developer will ever commit to ship software free of bugs. On the contrary, that would give people false security, which can in turn lead to further neglect.
Simon Tatham doesn't have any profits, but his PuTTY is installed on every developer's Windows machine.
someone taking non-commercial products and commercializing it is where the line is drawn right?