EU situation should be looked at by everyone [LWN.net]

EU situation should be looked at by everyone

Posted Dec 13, 2023 16:36 UTC (Wed) by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
In reply to: EU situation should be looked at by everyone by farnz
Parent article: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Debian doesn't own the copyright of any software included in an image, so it can't give you a custom copyright license - it can only copy verbatim the original licenses of anything that is included, which cannot be changed as per terms of the various copyleft licenses like GPL and friends.

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EU situation should be looked at by everyone

Posted Dec 13, 2023 16:42 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

It owns a copyright on the aggregation of the software into a single ISO image (the editorial choices about what to include and omit) - it can give you a licence to that. It can't give you a custom licence on the code inside the aggregation, though. And it's a licence for that aggregation that it's offering, in return for you accepting Debian's terms.

EU situation should be looked at by everyone

Posted Dec 13, 2023 17:17 UTC (Wed) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think even that is really the case though. Images are put together by volunteers, and there is no copyright assignment (how could there be? there's no legal entity to assign it to), so the copyright and license belongs to those authors. Given there is no trace of a commercial activity anywhere tied to any of this, I am extremely skeptical this can possibly constitute as marketing a product under any interpretation of the single market regulations.

EU situation should be looked at by everyone

Posted Dec 14, 2023 11:57 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Well therein lies the rub. You have one opinion, others have another. The definition of "to bring to market" apparently differs between member states according to other comments in this thread, with it claimed that Germany has a very wide ranging definition of such.

Without a clear and explicitly worded exception for things like Debian the CRA we may end up having to wait for cases to arise in a few member states. We do know the likes of ASF believe the CRA is /designed/ to apply to foundations like them, as they have directly engaged with relevant EU legislators on the issue. In the worst case, we may need to wait till a case goes to the ECJ to get clarity.