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Comment by guessbest | Hacker News Reader

They used to make a distribution of Linux called SELinux until Microsoft successfully lobbied the government to make them stop.

https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/research/selinux/

> The NSA, the original primary developer of SELinux, released the first version to the open source development community under the GNU GPL on December 22, 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

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Not exactly a Linux distribution. It's a kernel security feature for mandatory access control - and it's reasonably good, if difficult to use.

Edit:

Found a source on the parent's claim.

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/02/08/19/1750212/did-ms-lob...

How about the NYTimes?

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/07/business/us-vs-microsoft-...

> Last year, Microsoft even hired Ralph Reed, the political consultant who was at the time a senior adviser to the Bush campaign. His job was to urge Mr. Bush to take a softer approach toward the company if elected president.

GWB dropped the antitrust case again Microsoft after elected to be the President of USA

The specific point that NSA halted SELinux development at Microsoft's behest (I had never heard of this) is more demanding of citations than Microsoft's general lobbying of the federal government (which they certainly did). There's no mention of NSA or SeLinux in that NYT article.

I only know SELinux because of how many times I've had to disable it in order to use root on android effectively.

The idea that Microsoft killed NSA work on SELinux is trivially disprovable. There are NSA developers active on the SELinux and Linux Kernel mailing lists... https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/8/5/727

And SE for Android was first proposed by a NSA employee in 2011, well after Microsoft's whinging https://selinuxproject.org/~jmorris/lss2011_slides/caseforse...

Was Microsoft nervous the government was going to legitimize Linux and lose out on selling the gov't Window licenses? Why would MS lobby to stop this?

Microsoft was worried that the tech sector would focus on Linux especially for TCO if Linux development was funded using public money. This was all explained years ago in marketing material from Microsoft.

> InfoWorld | OCT 27, 2004 3:00 PM PST

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2679783/ballmer--windows-t...

Does Microsoft receive money from the government for Windows licenses? Yes, then MS is funded using public money. You mustn't forget that whenever you point a finger, there are three more pointing back at you.

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