EU’s Cyber Resilience Act Passes with Wins for Open Source

Back in April, we wrote to the community about our concerns for the future of the open source ecosystem generally and CPython and PyPI specifically if the European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) were to pass in the form that had been shared. At the time, we were worried that in the course of providing software for anyone to use, analyze or change that the PSF and/or the Python community might become legally responsible for security issues in the products that are built with the code components that we are providing for free. We asked for increased clarity, specifically:

The good news is that CRA text* changed a lot between the time the open source community – including the PSF – started expressing our concerns and the Act’s final text which was cemented on December 1st. That text introduces the idea of an “open source steward.”

Furthermore, the final text demonstrates a crisper understanding of how open source software works and the value it provides to the overall ecosystem of software development.

So are we totally done paying attention to European legislation? Ah, while it would be nice for the Python community to be able to cross a few things off our to-do list, that’s not quite how it works. Firstly, the concept of an “open source steward” is a brand new idea in European law. So, we will be monitoring the conversation as this new concept is implemented or interacts with other bits of European law to make sure that the understanding continues to reflect the intent and the realities of open source development. Secondly, there are some other pieces of legislation in the works that may also impact the Python ecosystem so we will be watching the Product Liability Directive and keeping up with the discussion around standard-essential patents to make sure that the effects on Python and open source development are intentional (and hopefully benevolent, or at least benign.) 

Thank you to Open Forum Europe (OFE) — especially Ciarán O’Riordan – for bringing the FOSS community together to share our thoughts on how the proposed text would affect open source, thinking about how the goals of the proposed act might be achieved without unintentionally creating a chilling effect for open source and communicating those ideas to legislators. OFE’s work to coordinate our efforts certainly made it easier for the PSF’s concerns to be heard and I’m fairly certain it made it easier for legislators to assess and consider impacts to the open source ecosystem when we were able to speak with one voice. 

*The entire Regulation is published here, if you want to dive into the text more deeply.