The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open 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.

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?

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.

> 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?

A government can control a piece of open source software the same way a big tech company does - with economies of scale. In other words, by throwing more money, resources, and warm bodies at their open source projects than anybody else.

The code itself might be under an open license, but project governance is free to remain self-interested and ignorant of the needs of the "community."

Any pull request accepted from outside isn't a mutual exchange of developer labor for the benefit of all, but the company successfully tricking an outside developer into doing free work for them.

Any pull request that runs counter to the interests of the company can and will be ignored or rejected, no matter how much effort was put into it or how much it would benefit other users.

Any hostile forks are going to be playing a catch-up game, as community efforts cannot outpace the resources of most large companies.

As long as upstream is open source, forks can just keep syncing. At some point, the upstream will then usually switch to open core, or some sort of delayed open source, but often that leads to people leaving for the open forks, hopefully donating to them, too.

(Gentle reminder to subscribe to donate to a FOSS project or two that you use.)

Which projects are you referring to here?

Because in my experience, the projects that I can think of that switch to open core are those that are started by smaller businesses when a large multinational tech company starts to mess with their revenue streams.

In that case, I don't fault them in the slightest. As a matter of fact, I think these days it's now a sucker's bet to build a company around an open source product. Free software? Maybe. Source available or open core from the start? Possibly. A fully permissive license that in the outside chance my product is successful, suddenly puts me in competition with Amazon and Microsoft, so they can kill my business with my own software? Forget about it.