I liked this on Lightning and money transmission: https://medium.com/@ekladous/are-bitcoin-lightning-nodes-money-transmitters-24cc5f1a38c6

If you run a Lightning node, you are obviously running software that helps people to transmit money. However, the transmitter can't steal the money, and that article gives multiple other reasons why Lightning is expected to be safe from the regs

But I'm still a bit nervous about this. Regulators might try to cause trouble for Lightning nodes

developing and releasing software as code.

but is "publishing" mean deployed, maintained, and operated as a contract/service on the network(s)?