Absolutely. It’d be amazing if we could do that! Where’s the human capacity though? Please feel free to volunteer! We need way more policy-aware voices from the tech community to take interest and participate. The early experiment of the tech-policy scholarship which is still running, its sole goal is to enable this. @rahulporuri got involved via that.
The pace at which tech laws, policies, and regulations are coming out in India, and the disproportionately tiny amount of participation (just about non-zero) from what is a massive tech community, is beyond scary. I’ve said the same thing in multiple places already: Technology+Policy course scholarship for FOSS devs
There’s this happening in EU, and it’s only a matter of time before stuff like this starts happening everywhere. If something like this comes through, the concept of freedoms in FOSS goes out of the window.
However, if applied as written, the bill could make authors of free and open source (FOSS) projects legally and financially responsible for how their projects are used within others’ commercial projects. This is a problem since Open Source software is, by definition, distributed “as is,” with no guarantees, thus relieving authors of any liability.
https://www.lpi.org/blog/2023/09/20/will-the-european-union-erect-barriers-to-foss/
Stuff like this and numerous other things (not just in India, globally) strongly indicate that tech/FOSS isn’t going to be just about repositories, code, and sharing anymore. It’s going to be increasingly legislative (at the hands of bureaucrats and not technical people). The golden era of unhindered software freedoms and liberties, we have to wonder how long it’s going to last.
Techies need to be aware of policy and legislation and they need to actively participate and engage rather than sleep walk. There have to be strong, collective, informed, and technical voices from the community that engage with tech policy and law making.