Comment by igregoryca

18 hours ago

Wood is edible when processed correctly, but it's not legally considered "food" because there are a bunch of nontrivial steps to get it into that state. Likewise, any reasonable interpretation of "general purpose computer" in this context by a judge would not include your microwave oven just because someone with skill and finesse could transform it into a cursed Doom arcade machine.

Laws are interpreted by people trained to fill in the blanks[1] with a best guess of the legislative body's intent. And the intent here seems pretty clear: to regulate computing devices that let end users easily install software from a centralized catalog.

[1] which we all do subconsciously in day-to-day speech, because all language is ultimately subjective

They exempt applications that run inside another “host application” though, which is ~ everything in any modern app store.

I guess Linux native games on GoG might be covered. All windows and wsl programs run in userspace compat layers. iOS might be covered. Snap, probably not (containers), AppImage? Maybe?

Nix, and brew? Probably not.