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597 points doener | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.193s | source
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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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jll29 ◴[] No.46181734[source]
The sabotage scenario is perhaps less likely than the alternative scenario of industrial and political espionage.

There are also practical advantages: the ability to fix a bug in-house instead of waiting for a technology giant from another continent.

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lo_zamoyski ◴[] No.46181754[source]
> the ability to fix a bug in-house

Yes, but bureaucracies make this impossible. If you have worked at a bank before, you'll know how difficult it is to make a change to some in-house piece of software. And that's a bank, not a gov't institution. Think how much more friction there will be in the latter.

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1. __d ◴[] No.46186416[source]
At a certain size (and government departments are absolutely large enough) it makes sense to manage software deployment centrally, from an internal package repository/cache.

Once that’s in place, the process for populating that repository can easily adopt locally modified versions of upstream software: defaults changed, bugs removed, features added, etc.

No one in a big business/government blinks at changing group policies for internal deployment. Changing the code is really very little different once the ability to do so is internalized.