Licensing and Attacks on Software Freedom
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DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Bruce Perens: “Open Source Has Failed Its Users.”
Bruce Perens has finally admitted that “Open Source has failed its users.” from the angle that users who expect to have Freedom from Open Source usually get no such thing at all.
Ever since the Open Source “movement” started, it has not been about the Freedom of the user at all.
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[Repeat] Bert Hubert ☛ EU CRA: The compiler does not read the comments, but judges do read the Recitals
However, this swiftness that we have with grasping the mechanics often blinds us to the broader context and (sadly) underdocumented rules and lore that also govern how laws work. Also, the mindset of anyone in information or computer security is to find loopholes, and to figure out what would happen in the worst case.
This has led some to draw incorrect conclusions, often even based on outdated versions of the EU CRA.
So here some partial clarification.
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Bert Hubert ☛ EU CRA: What does it mean for open source?
The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now officially available, and various open source voices are currently opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states to get a CRA that is good for open source. I’ve also been highly critical.
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EU ☛ CYBER 325 JAI 1703 DATAPROTECT 383 TELECOM 402 MI 1153 CSC 575 CSCI 214 CODEC 2560 [PDF]
(4a) The Commission should prepare guidance to assist economic operators, particularly micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, in the application of this Regulation. Guidance should cover inter alia the scope of this Regulation, in particular the notion of remote data processing and the implications for free and open-source software developers, the application of the criteria used to determine the support period of products with digital elements, the interplay between this Regulation and other Union law and the notion of substantial modifications.