Marzepansion

I'm a game dev, so my perspective on this can be biased, but my honest opinion is if games are too expensive for you to buy, go pirate them. That's exactly the situation places like Argentina are in now. Let us westerners subsidize the cost of development until your country gets back on track and you are able to buy more than just staple goods (40% of Argentina is considered living in poverty or worse).

This goes for people in poverty anywhere in the world tbh even in the West. Piracy doesn't really move the needle much (but do try to support indie devs if you can)

Pretty standard really. You don't want contributions to the codebase come under questionable copyright concerns, or the original creator to revoke the code 4 years later causing huge headaches potentially.

You typically have to sign these types of CLA's whenever you need to contribute to any serious project. I've had to do it for Google and Microsoft recently, and I've done it for various other open source projects as well.

Still that shouldn't concern users/gamedevs as they don't contribute to the engine code typically. Only if they want to upstream changes back into the engine publicly they would need to sign it ofcourse

I don't agree with what this proposal is aiming to do (and goes against prior EU related privacy rulings), but unfettered free speech isn't as "free" as the average American thinks it is, besides that the EU already doesn't have free speech. Many regions ban Nazi related speech for obvious historical reasons.

I'd reconsider using America's "free speech" as a model as they barely practice what they preach. Sure they have free speech, but they lack privacy protection mechanisms that then allow their police to skirt the rules and obtain evidence using tools that completely breach the veil of privacy, something many EU countries (including my own) have voted can never be used. The scope of intel gathering their intelligence community is capable of already is at a level where privacy no longer exist and all you're left with is the illusion of it.

What I'm saying is, sure this proposal is bad, but what we need isn't free speech, but protected privacy. Something the EU is having some decent success with already (compare to the US where this is conveniently forgotten as technology improves, see the earlier police argument to see what that leads to). Speech isn't going to be the only problem, as cameras achieve the ability to do facial recognition and track you everywhere (something I know EU is/has banned, see the "AI act"), and more technology allows for other types of tracking

Besides some countries in the EU already have electronic ID identifiers. They can just contact them to verify I'm claiming who I am without this weird "yeah we need a picture of you, and look through your webcam". Banks don't need to do this to verify who I am, so I don't see why "X" needs this weird privacy invading process

Thankfully I don't care about X (lol), and with more and more of my industry moving to mastodon I'm quite happy that I need it less and less to keep up with papers and articles