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.
99% of open source software development is part of a commercial activity.
As I understand it - the act essentially makes contributors to open source software legally responsible for any security flaws. If it passes into law, I’ll stop contributing to open source. I’m not going to risk having to defend myself in court — it’s just not worth it.
No it doesn’t. It makes IBM responsible for what it ships in Red Hat, it doesn’t apply to someone that made some library in their weekend that somehow ended up on all Linux distributions.
That may be the intent, but laws have side effects and bureaucrats are all too eager to enforce them.
Hows does the limitation of liability section in basically every open source license factor into this? It seems like you’d be fine as long as you aren’t personally using the code commercially? Or would this new law somehow override the open source license?
The latter. The law always takes precedence over contract terms.