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Comment by solosoyokaze | Hacker News Reader

It really bothers me that this seems to be based on Microsoft's word. I don't trust them. I don't want MS involved with the government at all, let alone as the spark that starts a new cold war. The US and its allies have done plenty of "cyber-attacks", yet no one seems up in arms about that. PRISM was a cyber-attack on our own citizens!

This whole thing smells like manufactured consent.

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You're going to have a really really tough time riding Microsoft from government, considering it really is the number 1 enterprise software solution stack, and nothing even comes close to what Microsoft does in enterprise environments. I get that the hackernews crowd is very linux-biased because most of the web-software development world is based around linux. It's easy to think that linux is everything when it's really not.

There should be legislation that mandates the use of open source software. I am no ok with my tax dollars going to Microsoft or any private software company. I'm also not ok with the government running closed source software (that does who knows what behind the scenes). Cut off Microsoft's government revenue and focus that cash on open source development and there will be replacements for MS products in no time.

At this point, Russia is already maximally sanctioned, so really this is more like posturing by the US.

In what world is Russia maximally sanctioned? Compare sanctions In Iran to Russia and I think you'll find Russia is barely sanctioned at all.

The Russian economy crashed around as much as Iran's. But as it is Russia-US trade is basically zero.

Russia simply cannot be targeted by secondary sanctions though. It's just a much bigger economy that has a much bigger impact in worldwide trade. So the maximum possible extent before governments start clamping down on secondary sanctions is much lower.

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