Debian infrastructure in the EU / copyright challenges
There has been some discussion about the potential impact of the latest
copyright legislation[1] on sites/services that share source code or
facilitate collaborative development services.
The EU vote on those rules potentially takes place in about 2 months.
One of the key concerns is that while such sharing won't be banned,
compliance with the laws would be costly. For a volunteer and
non-profit organization like Debian, this is obviously unpleasant.
While it is the EU right now, this type of thing could appear anywhere
(e.g. the US or a country that leaves the EU but copies EU laws to
maintain market access)
DSA has been talking about a new 5-year plan to start replacing
hardware[2] from 2017 onwards, this will potentially be costly in terms
of volunteer effort and finances and it would be useful to ensure both
the location of the hardware and the strategies used for producing
Debian will be resilient against bumbling lawyers and politicians
throughout the life of that infrastructure.
Has there already been any discussion or assessment of these risks
within Debian or other communities?
How much of the new hardware may potentially be located in the countries
concerned?
This type of situation is not completely new - for many years, we had
the non-US issues[3] which only ended in sarge / 2005.
Regards,
Daniel
1.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/eu-internet-advocates-launch-campaign-stop-eus-dangerous-copyright-filtering
2. https://micronews.debian.org/2017/1486409314.html
3. https://wiki.debian.org/non-US
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