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GnarfGnarf ◴[] No.46181666[source]
I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

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al_borland ◴[] No.46181909[source]
Today when a government pushes for a backdoor we often see companies push back. The FBI publicly complained about iMessage encryption a lot, and currently Apple is also telling the government of India they aren’t going to install their “security” software… those are just a couple examples.

What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?

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lucianbr ◴[] No.46182117[source]
How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or activate kill-switches? Maybe Linus controls Linux, but can he "flick a switch and kill" any running kernels? He might be able to insert backdoors, but will they go unnoticed? Would anyone be forced to install them? Just patch the code to remove the backdoor.

I feel that you wrote some words that only seem to make sense if we don't think about them too much.

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1. rocqua ◴[] No.46182260[source]
Linux is not a smart target. But OpenOffice, nextcloud, postfix, those are much easier targets for developer coercion to compromise widely installed software that is important for "linux on the desktop". Ah and ofcourse also the desktop environments, and perhaps systemD are all in a privileged position with much less eyes on.