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Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

This is just the final draft, this was not their intention before. They wanted to hold opensource devs legally liable before. Only after several months of backlash, lobbying and bad PR, they changed it into that.

They will most likely bring that clause back in a few years after the current bill is passed. Once they realise that their current law is essentially subsidizing security of the whole world, by making only EU businesses pay for it.

Laws like this should only be applied to billion dollar companies not small businesses or startups. It just hurts EU innovators while benefiting everyone else.

Laws don’t matter, they almost always sound sweet in decent governments like EU. What effects those laws cause in the real world when accounting for all players in the market matter a lot more.

And this law will yet again benefit non-EU startups while hurting EU startups.

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I recommend actually reading the CRA[1] the requirements for non-critical software are easy to follow. If your product does not fall into the categories described in Annex III you are making non-critical software.

The requirements are described in Annex IV, V and VI. You must do a conformity assessment and provide a declaration of conformity. For non-critical software you can do the assessment yourself see the first five points in Annex VI. The only thing that maybe requires a bit of effort is that you must write some technical documentation including a cybersecurity risk assessment. For critical software the process is more involved because it requires certification by a "notified body".

If a startup in the EU fails because they have to write a bit of documentation once in a while they deserve to fail. Also if a startup wants to create security relevant software I expect that they follow some security standard and the CRA makes sure of that. None of these requirements are something only a billion dollar company can do.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

You could say all of that of other things e.g. the MDR, where the end result in practice is complete crap. The system of "notified bodies" is commercial bureaucracy with random efficiency. If an agency wants to audit me, just dot it. The FDA does, with lower delays than commercial EU notify bodies... (right now the EU is accumulating more and more years of delay on putting medical devices on the market, even locally developped)

> They wanted to hold opensource devs legally liable before

No, the legislators hadn't considered open source software at the early stages. Once that gap was realised, there were negotiations and exceptions were carved out.

> It just hurts EU innovators while benefiting everyone else

Believe it or not, but the EU's higher priority is EU people and consumers, not startups. It will be possible to run a startup under CRA, just as it is now possible under GDPR.

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