I believe that should not be a valid defense, ever.

If you're not OK with what you're ordered to do, you should not do it (and we should have a system of justice and social support which honors that).

If you actually do something you're responsible for that deed, ie possibly culpable.

If you're being pressured/manipulated/... the person doing so is responsible for that, so culpable as well - but not in place - if applicable.

German law actually contains an apologetic first step in this direction, called 'Remonstration'. I think we can all guess how it wound up in that particular legal system.

Besides being able to point at the article and say "see, we fixed it", I'm not aware of a single (let alone significant) case where it was actually/successfully used.

In somewhat interesting contrast, German law does not codify protection of whistle blowers, for example.

It's not so much about forcing to contribute, but rather keeping companies from selling commercial forks/having checks against profiting from work that happens to be freely available.

How is it an "undisclosed [amount of] damages" - aren't court rulings supposed to be public [records]?

I know stuff like the rulings of me going to court with the driver and insurance companies involved in a car accident certainly was public (in Germany).

Anyone in the know please ELI5 and/or point me at the relevant laws, how/what/in which cases (parts of) rulings can be "undisclosed".

It's called enshittification for sure.

It's got 'lectrolytes!!

Doctorow's as usual excellent take also touches on this:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

TL;DR: it's not so much only the US, it's corporate (quasi-)monopolies, and those operate in a lot of countries.

Where did you go?

I found it kinda weird that the page this link opens on makes it look kinda like a closed source freemium thing, and (on mobile) I had to dig a fair bit to see that it's actually FOSS and an official part of the KDE project.

I run KDE as my daily driver, and hadn't heard of Krita before; so yeah, I guess it could use a bit more exposure.

Which - in my considered opinion - makes them so much worse.

Is it because writing native UI on all current systems I'm aware of is still worse than in the times of NeXTStep with Interface Builder, Objective C, and their class libraries?

And/or is it because it allows (perceived) lower-cost "web developers" to be tasked with "native" client UI?

Kinda disappointed in The Register of all things adopting this faux personal life story reporting style on such a matter.

Started negotiating at 40%, agreed to 10% less "so 10% of 40 is 4, right?"