The European Cyber Resilience Act

Posted Sep 19, 2023 19:57 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: The European Cyber Resilience Act by kleptog
Parent article: The European Cyber Resilience Act

> Because in this whole discussion I get the feeling that there's a lot of reaching for worst case scenarios and looking for interpretations of words that seem pretty far-fetched.

Eh, think of the law as being written in an ambiguous, badly-scoped programming language. Sure, there's the nominal intent of the law, but there may be unintentional (or for the cynical, intentional) side effects that might only crop up in some specific corner cases. It just so happens that developers of F/OSS seems to heavily intersect this time.

Just because the current crop of politicians/courts/etc can be trusted and is "reasonable" doesn't mean their successors will be. History has shown us over and over that bad actors can and will take advantage of these fuzzy grey areas, and it's always the relatively powerless that pay the price.

The European Cyber Resilience Act

Posted Sep 19, 2023 21:20 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

If politicians/courts/etc want to be evil, they're not going to let themselves be held back by the precise meanings of words. They'll simply say the meaning they want was the correct meaning all along and do what they wanted to anyway. The fact that everyone in this process recognises the unusual position of open source is far more important than the precise words used to describe it. The best defence is to prevent power accumulating in the first place so that what a single person says doesn't have significant impact.

The European Cyber Resilience Act

Posted Sep 21, 2023 8:44 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> If politicians/courts/etc want to be evil, they're not going to let themselves be held back by the precise meanings of words

Yeah, but if they are (or act) merely incompetent or clueless, words with precise meaning are the last resort of the competent.