Deb Nicholson
Deb Nicholson is an open source software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Executive Director at the Python Software Foundation which serves as the non-profit steward of the Python programming language. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award and the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for her efforts to broaden the free and open source software movement. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Spritely Institute and on the Advisory Board for Open@RIT. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sessions
The EU Commission is likely to vote on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) later this year. The CRA is an ambitious step towards protecting consumers from software security issues by creating a new list of responsibilities for software developers and providers. The Act also creates a new category of actor known as an “Open Source Steward” which we think makes important allowances for public open source repositories like CPython and Python Package Index (PyPI.) Once the dust settles, everyone who makes software will need to consider the CRA’s mandates in their security roadmaps.
In this talk we will look at the timeline for the new legislation, any critical discussions happening around implementation and most importantly, the new responsibilities outlined by the CRA. We’ll also discuss what the PSF is doing for CPython and for PyPI and what each of us in the Python ecosystem might want to do to get ready for a new era of increased certainty – and liability – around security.
Target audience
Developers and maintainers whose project or product may be affected by the CRA. European legislation won’t just affect the European market, it will affect the software industry and the open source community globally as it is very hard to segregate one project or product from the EU market. So, this is for everyone in the Python community who shares their code with the world.
Goal
To educate the general public about CRA - how it can affect us and how to get ready for it. We also want to provide more information for the Python community about what has been done by the PSF regarding the CRA to reassure them that the Python community is aware and getting prepared for the CRA.
The motivation behind this panel is to provide insights to the audience with regards to funding open source projects, manage the community interaction, and options people might find attractive in order to be paid while doing Open source.
We can also observe the sustainability of a project by the amount of contributors, even if it’s code or activities around it like conferences, communities, and NGOs that support the ecosystem.