It’s a weak defense because the clients still exchanged metadata with other clients, plus there’s the big issue of using the copyrighted works for their own profit, and not just archiving/preservation/personal use

Where now are the copyright trolls that sued regular students for millions of dollars for downloading 30 songs?

Under federal law, the recording companies were entitled to $750 to $30,000 per infringement. But the law allows as much as $150,000 per track if the jury finds the infringements were willful.

Let me see:

• At least 100 million of books pirated
• infringements were willful

So, a 15k billion dollars fine seem appropriate to give to Meta AND criminal sentences to all the c suite.

Or: apply the same rules to regular people and allow unlimited copyright violations without consequences

Protect from accidental data damage: for example the dev might have accidentally pushed an untested change where there’s a space in the path

rm -rf / ~/.thatappconfig/locatedinhome/nothin.config

a single typo that will wipe the whole drive instead of just the app config (yes, it happened, I remember clearly more a decade ago there was a commit on GitHub with lots of snarky comments on a script with such a typo)

Also: malicious developers that will befriend the honest dev in order to sneak an exploit.

Those scripts need to be universal, so there are hundreds of lines checking the Linux distro and what tools are installed, and ask the user to install them with a package manager. They require hours and hours of testing with multiple distros and they aren’t easy to understand too… isn’t it better to use that time to simply write a clear documentation how to install it?

Like: “this app requires to have x, y and z preinstalled. [Instructions to install said tools on various distros], then copy it in said subdirectory and create config in ~/.ofcourseinhome/”

It’s also easier for the user to uninstall it, as they can follow the steps in reverse