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Will the European Cyber Resilience Act Kill Open Source Software? (fossforce.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by bbbhltz@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Not a big fan of the title (asking question in the title isn't a great idea) but the conclusions give a good summary:

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) represents a significant step in Europe’s efforts to enhance cybersecurity. However, its potential implications for the open source software community have raised serious concerns. Critics argue that the legislation, in its current form, could impose undue burdens on open source contributors and inadvertently increase the risk of software vulnerabilities being exploited.

New insights from GitHub’s blog post highlight additional concerns. The CRA could potentially introduce a burdensome compliance regime and penalties for open source projects that accept donations, thereby undermining the sustainability of these projects. It could also regulate open source projects unless they have “a fully decentralised development model,” potentially discouraging companies from allowing their employees to contribute to open source projects. Furthermore, the CRA could disrupt coordinated vulnerability disclosure by requiring any software developer to report to ENISA all actively exploited vulnerabilities within a timeline measured in hours after discovering them.

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[–] koreth@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The "developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity" condition is part of why people are up in arms about this. If I'm at work and I run into a bug and submit a patch, my patch was developed in the course of a commercial activity, and thus the project as a whole was partially developed in the course of a commercial activity.

How many major open-source projects have zero contributions from companies?

It also acts as a huge disincentive for companies to open their code at all. If I package up a useful library I wrote at work, and I release it, and some other person downloads it and exposes a vulnerability that is only exploitable if you use the library in a way that I wasn't originally using it, boom, my company is penalized. My company's lawyers would be insane to let me release any code given that risk.

[–] zero_iq@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Ah, OK. So it seems it's a case of the spirit of the text not matching the precise technical wording used. IMO, the legislation clearly intends to exclude freely-distributable open-source software, but the issue lies with what constitutes a commercial activity. (I've not yet checked the rest of the document to see if it clearly defines "commercial activity" in relation to the legislation.)

TBH, it seems that what is needed here is a clarification and tightening up of definitions, not wholesale rejection of the legislation.