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akerstentoday at 2:01 AM0 repliesview on HN

If we insist on stretching this absurd metaphor, the government would be issuing civil penalties to "water distributors" who provide water without the requisite floridation, where "water distributors" includes not just Aquafina for selling bottled water, but also the lemonade stand the kids set up in front of the house and you, in your home kitchen, serving your house guests water from your reverse-osmosis private reserve.

It seems metaphor is important to you, so hopefully this thoroughly illustrates the insanity of this law.

The point is there are no carve outs (for open source). Your toy operating system is just as liable as Microsoft to implement this. In the real world, the health department does not require your home cocktail hour beverages to meet industrial water supply mineralization standards.

Perhaps you believe that analogue is "a few people raising a stink" because you don't really believe the "health department" would go after my "little open source water faucet." But the way the law is written, there's nothing stopping them. And none of us want to be the test case. And that's not even getting into the whole "compelled speech" problem, but I'm going to have to leave that line of argument to someone else to analogize.