nybble41

To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?

There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn’t have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.

Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to “reputation servers” which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.

The monopoly issue won’t be resolved so long as there is artificial exclusivity over the content, i.e. copyright. That’s the most critical monopoly of all. Different streaming services can’t compete on how good they are at streaming because their content isn’t interchangeable; you can’t just swap one show for another even when they’re similar in style and production quality.

The absolute minimum requirement to resolve this would be obligatory “reasonable and non-discriminatory” mechanical licenses allowing any streaming service to stream any content on equal terms regardless of source.

What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?

Then the FDA isn’t doing a very good job, are they? Ensuring that people hear their recommendations (and trust them) would be among their core goals.

The rare fringe cases where someone is affected indirectly without personally having choosen to purchase the product can be dealt with through the courts. There is no need for preemptive bans.

You misunderstood. It’s not a middle ground between “can regulate” and “cannot regulate”. That would indeed be idiotic. It’s a middle ground between “must judge everything for yourself” and “someone else determines what you have access to”. Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it’s worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).

No, I am not okay with bans like that. You should be able to knowingly buy products with mercury in them. Obviously if someone is selling products containing mercury and not disclosing that fact, passing them off as safe to handle, that would be a problem and they would be liable for any harm that resulted from that. But it doesn’t justify a preemptive ban.

Who is enforcing this and how?

Liability would be decided by the courts or another form of binding arbitration. Obviously. Harming someone through action or negligence is a tort, and torts are addressed by the judicial branch. Both sides would present their arguments, including any scientific evidence in their favor—the FDA or similar organizations could weigh in here as expert witnesses, if they have something to offer—and the court will decide whether the vendor acted reasonably or has liability toward the defendant.

If you knowingly sell me a car with an engine about to fail, you are in no way accountable.

If you knew that the engine was about to fail and didn’t disclose that fact, or specifically indicate that the vehicle was being sold “as-is” with no guarantees, then you certainly should be accountable for that. Your contract with the buyer was based on the premise that they were getting a vehicle in a certain condition. An unknown fault would be one thing, but if you knew about the issue and the buyer did not then there was no “meeting of the minds”, which means that the contract is void and you are a thief for taking their payment under false pretenses.

Anyway, you continue to miss the point. I’m not saying that everyone should become an expert in every domain. I’m saying that people should be able to choose their own experts (reputation sources) rather than have one particular organization like the FDA (instance/community moderators) pre-filtering the options for everyone. I wasn’t even the one who brought up the FDA—this thread was originally about online content moderation. If you insist on continuing the thread please try to limit yourself to relevant points.

Unreal is “source available”, not Open Source. There’s a big difference. With any Open Source project you can legally fork the project, distribute your custom version of the code, create a community around your variant… “source available” has none of that. The Unreal EULA is more permissive than most game engine licenses (with the obvious exception of Godot) but it still comes with plenty of restrictions. For example:

You are permitted to post snippets of Engine Code, up to 30 lines of code in length, online in public forums for the sole purpose of discussing the content of the snippet or Distribute such snippets in connection with supporting patches and plug-ins for the Licensed Technology, so long as it is not for the purpose of enabling third parties without a license to the Engine Code to use or modify any Engine Code or to aggregate, recombine, or reconstruct any larger portion of the Engine Code.

Which pretty clearly does not satisfy the Open Source Definition.

The most valuable thing is an experienced team who thoroughly understand both the specifications and the implementation as well as the reasoning behind both. Written specifications are great as onboarding and reference material but there will always be gaps between the specifications and the code. (“The map is not the territory.”) Even with solid specifications you can’t just turn over maintenance of a codebase to a new team and expect them to immediately be productive with it.

MongoDB is under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) which is not an Open Source license.

Just luxury spending and underperforming investments. Essential spending can’t be deferred, and worthwhile investments will outpace any natural rate of deflation. Forced inflation drives conspicuous consumption and malinvestment, but in doing so it increases monetary velocity, which helps bankers and tax collectors extract higher rent from the economy.