Distributions quote of the week [LWN.net]

Distributions quote of the week

Posted Oct 12, 2023 10:22 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Distributions quote of the week by 5fdb1f
Parent article: Distributions quote of the week

This is currently perfectly acceptable around the world, legally speaking; one of the reasons some entities are railing against the EU's proposed Cyber Resilience Act is that it would make places that sell a product with both hardware and software components responsible for the software components they sell, and the only way for Pine64 to escape responsibility in law would be to sell the device with no software.

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Distributions quote of the week

Posted Oct 17, 2023 3:26 UTC (Tue) by Fishwaldo (subscriber, #47595) [Link] (1 responses)

It’s will be an interesting position that pine64 will find them in if that ever happens. The companies goal is to get cheap hardware into the hands of developers and let the “community” maintain the software for it. By not maintaining software stacks, they are able to keep costs low. Whatever software they do ship with devices is either a BSP package from the upstream hardware vendor (Eg, Rockchip) or software developed by the community (eg, some devs may get pre-production units for testing etc). Pine64 (the company) don’t employ any software devs at all, and currently call out software support issues as a community support only. (https://pine64.com/support/). Given their target market is more developers than end users, they could find themselves in a rough spot if that act ever goes into law. (Disclaimer: I received free hardware from pine64 to help bootstrap their PineTabV product. In that particular case, it shipped with a “factory test” image to validate the hardware worked but wasn’t intended to be used as an end user image)

Distributions quote of the week

Posted Oct 17, 2023 9:41 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The easy position for the company to take is to sell hardware without any software, and then it's not liable for the software, because it doesn't ship any software, nor does it point you to binaries it recommends. With the current way the CRA is drafted, if it points you to projects where it's upstreamed its hardware support (where it doesn't have control - e.g. Linux kernel), then they're completely safe; the hardware they sell is developer kits, non-functional as a phone, and to make it functional, you have to buy the devkit, and find suitable software separately.