Felicity Brand
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)
The CRA is a proposed law intended to strengthen cyber security in the EU, but in its current form, it is incompatible with the way open source communities build software. This could prevent free and open source (FOSS) projects from practicing within the EU.
The organizations backing content management platforms Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, and WordPress wrote an open letter to emphasize the significance of FOSS to the EU’s economy, aims, and values.
Joint FOSS CMS Community Meeting
On 2 August 2023, the organizations behind the Open Letter held a cross-community webinar to discuss the letter and FOSS CMS collaboration. The meeting was hosted by:
- Tim Doyle, CEO, Drupal Association
- Crystal Dionysopoulos, president, Open Source Matters, Inc. (Joomla)
- Mathias Bolt Lesniak, board member, TYPO3 Association
- Josepha Haden Chomphosy, executive director, WordPress Project
Ciarán O'Riordan, senior policy advisor at OpenForum Europe, was invited to give an overview of the proposed legislation and the challenges it is posing to open source.
The online meeting was open to all community members. It was well-attended, with more than 200 logged-in participants. Some of the logins represented community members watching the events together.
During the hour-long meeting, the representatives presented their CMS projects and the audience learned about the Cyber Resilience Act’s potential impact on open source CMSs. The event rounded off with a question-and-answer session and a promise to answer more questions in writing later.
