Open Source Initiative (OSI)

What might happen if the uncertainty persists around who is held responsible under the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)? The global Open Source community is averse to legal risks and generally lacks access to counsel, so it’s very possible offers of source code will simply be withdrawn rather than seeking to resolve the uncertainty. The CRA rightly addresses the need for commercial suppliers to protect their customers from exploits and cyber attacks. But legislators have exposed the open development of software itself to the regulations rather than just the for-profit use of Open Source artifacts in the marketplace. They are incorrectly assuming that Dirk Riehle’s terminology calling single-company projects “commercial Open Source” means it’s possible to use the “commerciality” of an application to distinguish single-company activity from community projects, and by using the concepts of proprietary software to then define boundaries.

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Machine learning has been around for a long time. But in late 2022, recent advancements in deep learning and large language models started to change the game and come into the public eye. And people started thinking, “We love Open Source software, so, let’s have Open Source AI, too.” But what is Open Source AI? And the answer is: we don’t know yet. Machine learning models are not software. Software is written by humans, like me. Machine learning models are trained; they learn on their own automatically, based on the input data provided by humans. When programmers want to fix a computer program, they know what they need: the source code. But if you want to fix a model, you need a lot more: software to train it, data to train it, a plan for training it, and so forth. It is much more complex. And reproducing it exactly ranges from difficult to nearly impossible.

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Imagine the chaos that would occur if all open source software vanished with the snap of a finger. Picture the devices that would turn to bricks in our hands, the infrastructure that would fail, and the machinery that would fall silent. The truth is we probably don't stop to think about all the open source libraries, frameworks, and components we depend on-until something goes wrong. The extraordinary impact of open source is difficult to measure or quantify...Open source is a testament to human ingenuity, and it's not often that we take the time to celebrate what we-the creators and users of open source-have made together. We think it's time we did. That's why we're announcing a new type of open source event called Upstream. It's a one-day celebration of open source for the developers who use it and the maintainers that create it. We'd like you to join us on June 7 for this entirely virtual and free event where we'll focus on the creators behind essential open source packages and the developers who build amazing things with them.

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