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.
This should be named the “Attempting to Kill Open Source Software by Imposing Impossible Burdens on the Same Act.” I’m not sure that they intended this to destroy open source projects but… it may have that effect regardless.
In words of Dan Geer from his 2014 Black Hat keynote:
Today the relevant legal concept is “product liability” and the
fundamental formula is “If you make money selling something, then
you better do it well, or you will be held responsible for the
trouble it causes.” For better or poorer, the only two products
not covered by product liability today are religion and software,
and software should not escape for much longer.The EU legislation has good intentions. Software should not escape product liability. However, the current proposal is somewhat flawed (unless EU actually intends to finance security testing for FOSS projects!) and it needs some language to protect open-source innovation and distributed development models.
I’m hoping the EU will allow a model where FOSS developers can receive donations/charge for support without having to risk huge penalties.
I didn’t read the article but one thing I can say is that open source cannot be killed, by design!
Why is everyone up in arms about this?
The legislation specifically excludes open source software. Has nobody in this discussion actually read the proposed legislation?
From the current proposal legislation text:
In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable.
There is also a clause that states those using open source software in commercial products must report any vulnerabilities found to the maintainer.
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.
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.
