Suzanne Taylor <staylor@ripe.net> wrote: > While the European technical community has welcomed the exception for > open-source software provided by the proposed text, the exemption > applies only to open-source software that is “developed or supplied > outside the course of a commercial activity”. This wording leaves a lot > of room for interpretation as to what, precisely, constitutes > commercial activity, especially when taking into consideration the fact > that charging for technical support services is considered commercial > activity, as is the monetisation of other services provided via a > software-sharing platform. Thank you for capturing my concerns very well. I think that the EC would do well to ignore exemptions by the license of the software. GPL, MIT, Apache, etc. are still just *copy*-rights, and they are really indistuighable by courts from other kinds of contracts. I think that the EC would do better to consider who are deploying and operating software, and to put the onus there. The Deutsche Bundesbank has a different set of responsabilities when deploying KeePass to keep track of router passwords than I, indivisual operator of a single-site AS has doing exactly the same thing. It seems that the best result is that many big operations, who have for a long long time benefitted from open source, ought to, under the CRA, begin to contributing to more maintainance for the systems they depend upon. -- Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@sandelman.ca> . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting ) Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide