Comment by jolmg
19 hours ago
I would argue they're not, because they're not fully under the responsibility of a commercial entity, because they're open source. Companies can volunteer employees to the project, even a project they started themselves, but the companies and employees can come and go. Open source projects exist independently as public goods. Ultimately, it just takes anyone in the world to fork a project to exclude everybody else from its development.
Mint started off as Ubuntu. Same project, with none of the support contracts, no involvement from Canonical needed at the end of the day, etc.
On a practical level, it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers whatever the case may be with regards to the employment of other contributors.
At some point it seems to devolve from a meaningful discussion about how things should be done into a semantic argument (which are almost always pointless).
> it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers
I agree when it comes to individuals. But it probably does make sense to hold formally recognized groups (such as nonprofits) accountable to various consumer laws. I think the idea odd that Windows, RHEL, Ubuntu, and Debian should all be regulated differently within a single jurisdiction given that they seem to me largely equivalent in purpose.