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
