Governments turn to Open Source for sovereignty
opensource.net
opensource.net
I'm very curious how this will work for them. It's quite a struggle to adopt OSS where the vast majority of users think "Office suite" == "M$ Office".
As someone born, raised and living/working in America (but with roots from South America), and who has been at odds with my kid's school system over these precise issues, I agree, the options available from predominantly American companies and used in American schools sucks badly! While western style capitalism might make sense in some areas of society, i think education should not be so blaringly driven by western style capitalism...the incentives perverse too much the goals of education system, and to the detriment of the children being educated, the taxpayers paying into the system to enable a good education system, these same children/students who in the future will lead the society, etc. Sorry, didn't mean to make it politicial...its simply annoying for me...And, i'm usuaully the person in discussions who is not minding paying full taxes - when they're used responsibily, because i understand having a society that is as educated as possible helps the future of all society in so many ways. Ok, i'm off my soap box now. Please carry on. :-)
EDIT/ADDENDUM: Sorry @Hiko0, I meant to add: Thanks for all that you do as a teacher!!! Its not an easy profession as it used to be (at least not in America). ;-)
"Yes, we fund Matrix dev by selling encrypted messaging to governments, which includes police: if you don’t like that then please feel free to use a different app."
EDIT: okay sorry, this was already mentionend in TFA
[0] which, completely shockingly I know, massively reduced the number is released contact traces
What’s misleading, exactly?
None of that is covered when I'm thinking about "developed an app for XX EUR". The money isn't the misleading part, it's the insinuation for what it was spend that's misleading. If you can dig up a itemised bill I'd be very interested, but I don't think anyone will get that in the next 10 years without a huge effort involving actual courts...
This is not what the license says.
"If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
"An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion."
The requirement to offer users of modified versions interacting remotely over a computer network a copy of the source is seperate and has no such limitation. Which rather suggests that the drafters of the license considered this issue of requiring people to make unrelated modifications and did nothing to stop it.
The Dovecot commercial product manager has for example said in a presentation[1]:
"there will be an open source version, but that open source version will be maintained for single server use only. we are actually taking out anything any actually kinda' involves multiple servers, dsync replication and err some other stuff. so dovecot will be a fully-featured single node server"
They also recently announced €1M in funding for Gnome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38284787
Btw, it seems my premise is incorrect, I thought only North Korea was doing a serious effort, but at least from Wikipedia it seems both Russia and China are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
As a 70's child, present times are starting to look like cold war times home computers.
I see no reason why we don't have EU-wide public email, mastodon, documents, and now AI. That is not such a huge project and it would give the EU huge creds for actually creating european infrastructure.
The Chinese do have a government-sponsored distro, Red Flag Linux, and at one point the Chinese government ordered Windows 2000 be uninstalled from government computers and replaced by Red Flag Linux, although whether that actually happened, while anyone’s guess, is unlikely.
They're trying to move away from proprietary software, not create more of it.
China developed, organized and promotes Kylin (Linux based) with a high degree of desktop penetration with the express purpose of replacing Windows and Apple desktops (laptops, etc.).
Russia funds, promotes and standardized Astra Linux. Same express purpose.
India promotes BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) with the same intentions. BOSS also has a standardized server configuration.
You can read more about national Linux/OSS endeavors all over the Web.
The 2014 events for Russia and the new cold war stuff for China seem to have pushed those countries into doing something. Thanks for the update.
Now with recent events, Europeans have started to realise we might eventually also be locked out of technologies that are too relevant for US.
The main point of RISC-V conference in Barcelona, was exactly how to bootstrap the whole ecosystem (hardware + software) across Europe.
Some years ago some large company (Microsoft?) came out and called open source a huge destroyer of wealth. They're correct, in the capitalist sense. But as we (largely tech people) know: open source allows us all to net benefit, which in turns creates opportunities.
Linux runs on billions of devices. This is collectivism in action.
By extension, proprietary software (as noted here) makes governments beholden to private companies. I fully support Germany (and other countris) in embracing open sourrce.
Are they?
Open source is inherently anti-copyright, but copyright is not inherently capitalist. Copyright is a restraint on trade enforced by the sovereign.
Saying "open source is inherently anti-capitalist" looks similar to saying "smuggling is inherently anti-capitalist". The logic is not obvious.
I think by "copyright" you really mean "intellectual property" (of which copyright is one part). Open source is really unrelated to IP. Open source has its own licenses and constraints just like proprietary software. Like I can make an open source H265 decoder but I could still get sued for violating MPAA patents.
But here's the key point: proprietary software is wealth extraction. Wealth extraction is what capitalism really is. Collective action, often volunteered, creates a free alternative for something that you previously had to pay for, thus bypassing that enclosure and wealth extraction. That's why it's anti-capitalist.
You might want to find a definition that allows you to converse with other people. It is generally not productive to assign your own personal meanings to words in common use.
> Open source is really unrelated to IP.
Why do you think open source takes the form of copyright licenses? Open source is a reaction against copyright, which puts the software back in the state you'd find it in if there were no copyright laws. It's not unrelated to IP; it is defined entirely by reference to IP law.
Previously we had feudalism. Monarchs ruled, typically through the divine right of kings, which was really just military might. Monarchs would have one or more levels of vassals who owned land in exchange for providing troops, food and/or resources to their feudal lord of king. At the bottom were serfs who needed to eat. Lords owned the land . In exchange for use of the land, serfs would grow food and provide food (and possibly military service) to their lords.
In Marxist terms, the lords exploited the excess value of labor.
By the end of the fedual era, produce was often sold and the serf owed his or her lord a payment, which was basically taxation.
Capitalism is the exact same system except that instead of lords and kings we have capital owners. They fulfil the same function: exploiting and extracting the surplus value of labor. "Profit" is surplus labor value.
There is no value without labor.
This is an interesting way to lead off your statement that capitalism is the same thing as feudalism.
Yeah, no. That would fly in the face of feudalism, mercantilism, socialism and communism. All of those are economic systems based on who owns the means of production. If your definition of capitalism isn't coherent with all of those, then it's not a correct one.
That's definitional for communism, but mercantilism? I understand mercantilism to be a policy focused on ensuring that national imports of gold exceed national gold exports, and feudalism to be mostly distinguished by the inability to sell land.
(Alternatively, feudalism might be characterized by a very weak central state that has delegated the authority to rule (or that just never possessed such authority). But that's more of a view of the political structure than the economic structure.)
Capitalism is built around a concept of private ownership, and as such, the author of a work is reasonably free to use their work as they see fit. That allows for something like open source software to exist and not, for instance, be stolen or destroyed by others.
Also, I think we are far away from collectivism, because typically only very, very, few people actually work on software, let alone open source software.
Finally, capitalist companies use open source software a lot. It is just a very efficient way of dealing with software, and a great way to make profit, because production costs are terribly low.
Not defending capitalism here, just saying that it is slightly more involved, as always.
That's not true at all. For one, there are more alternatives to capitalism than anarchy. Second, there are more users of open soruce than governments. Third, even though open source projects do have licenses and we have a legal system that enforces intellectual property, we've had very few court cases related to open source licenses because it's largely unnecessary. There's really no one to sue or be sued in an economically viable fashion. There's been very few cases. And you are largely free to fork an open source project that's happenedd many times.
> Also, I think we are far away from collectivism
Collectivism doesn't necessitate that everyone produces value.
> Finally, capitalist companies use open source software a lot. It is just a very efficient way of dealing with software
This goes to my point that collectivism can be a net benefit. The profit motive would want to build an enclosure around something like Linux and we'd all be worse off for it, companies included.
That's kind of the point.
Open Source however is like Free Software but made appealing to self-interested companies by convincing them sharing their software efforts can be mutually beneficial. It is no more anti-capitalist than having all the property owners in a capitalist society agree they are better off paying taxes and having a state to defend them from external threats instead of everyone having their private military.
Your ability to truly control what runs on your machine decreases every day. Want to keep being able to talk with your friends and family? Better update the respective app, even though it removed one of the key features you relied on or enjoyed. Oh hey, now another feature you really liked is subscription-only! No going back, either, once you updated you're locked into that functionality forever.
Oh yeah, if you don't update automatically, you'll just constantly be harassed by manipulative dialog boxes that say never let you actually say "no", your choices are "yes I submit" or "maybe I'll give in to your demands later". All these coercive features are strictly driven by exactly one thing: profit. That is the absolute defining factor of all coercive functionality in modern software.
The primary driver of open source software is providing something useful to empower people and improve their lives (even in a trivial sense like some inconsequential mini-game or utility only the author cares about).
The primary driver of proprietary software is profit. Actual benefit to humans is literally secondary -- if businesses could ship software that is made with zero lines of code and provides zero benefit to anyone, but people still paid $100 for it? They'd absolutely ship that without hesitation!
Really, I can talk about this dichotomy all day, because I've been recognizing this extreme contrast increasingly every day for years as I became more and more disillusioned by the increasing hostility I've experienced from the OSes and software I thought were trying to empower me but truly only care about extracting money from me (with usefulness seeming like a side effect begrudgingly fulfilled).
On the other hand, I can easily imagine a communist government requiring people to use certain proprietary software.
Property rights and voluntary exchange are the main characteristics of capitalism. What else do you want to abolish, if not that?
Example: I want to sell my labor to B for a salary, but due to corporate ownership being banned I am not allowed to. If you just limit the size of corporations, that will still happen when B has grown a bit and is unable to hire more people due to having hit the cap.
What if we transfer the company to some other entity? Well, I want to sell my labor to B, not to that new entity. Maybe I'm friends with B, or maybe I believe in B's vision, maybe B is giving me joint ownership of the corporation, or some other reason, doesn't matter why it still is a legal limitation.
So this has nothing to do with capitalism, it happens under every single system unless you have strong forces to prevent it. If you ban companies, then informal companies will appear in the form of mafias or similar (we call medieval maffias nobles), and those will completely ignore any regulations and therefore be the worst kind of capitalism.
Capitalism is the idea of the market regulating itself, no?. Regulation / Government is a mixed economy (Socialism (edit: this is incorrect)) at best.
The whole talking point (when it is convenient) around "free enterprise" is the lack of regulation, see neoliberalism.
Regulation is also not the answer when the people in charge of regulation are or are funded by the corporate entities being regulated.
Worker cooperatives or really any economic system that privileges socially intentional results is simply a better model. I'd much rather own the means of my production than have someone else regulate the work I also do for someone else. I'd also happen to need less government and have more agency to care for the welfare of others. Hmmm..
No, markets completely regulating themselves would be anarchism. Protecting your property rights and your contracts is a form of regulations in itself, that is the fundamental part of capitalism and is what enables large companies to form without military might.
Protecting property and contract rights encompasses many things, such as protecting your property from being taken from you via unfair means such as extortion etc. This necessitates limiting others property rights, others can't just build a wall around your property and force you to sell it for example.
> Regulation / Government is a mixed economy (Socialism) at best.
No, that is just regular capitalism. Socialism doesn't allow privately owned companies. Are you from USA? They misunderstand this part a lot, thinking that Europe isn't capitalist or something.
Huh, I am from the U.S. and I wasn't aware that Socialism was sort of all or nothing. (I'm not a socialist). I would say that it is presented differently (or at least culturally differently) where I am. Good catch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism says:
> The degree of competition in markets and the role of intervention and regulation, as well as the scope of state ownership, vary across different models of capitalism. The extent to which different markets are free and the rules defining private property are matters of politics and policy.
I do think that the point of my comment is definitely still at play, even if regulation is absorbed into the definition. Happy to speak more to it.
----- I can't seem to reply to comments, so let me rephrase.
"Huh, I didn't know that, thanks for the learning opportunity! I'm very used to hearing Socialism thrown around as a boogeyman in my country whenever a policy is mentioned that benefits people disenfranchised by the aggregation of capital into the hands of a few. I think my point is still valid, regardless."
But it is, socialism is when there is no private ownership of the means of production, that is core to it. Europe has social democracy combined with capitalism, there is no socialism there. Social democracy has nothing to do with socialism, they are completely different concepts.
Edit: Some social democracy might stem from socialist movements, but there is none of that left today. No part of Europe is moving towards socialism, they are all happily capitalist with a majority of their economies being in the private sector.
Social democracy is mainly about the government serving the people and ensuring everyone gets to live a decent life. So health care, social security etc. The same thing USA does but a bit more. It doesn't have anything to do with the means of production except trying to ensure that the system serves the people.
> I think my point is still valid, regardless.
Yeah, but unless you think that taxation is theft and thus violates property rights there is nothing that prevents a capitalist state from taxing people with excess and giving that to people in need.
The "taxation is theft" crowd aren't pro capitalism, they are pro anarcho-capitalism which is essentially just anarchy. Don't listen to them.
Okay, definitely sorry for the confusion. Let me sort of explain where I'm coming from.
My primary point is pretty simple.
> any economic system that privileges socially intentional results is simply a better model.
I do think it's very counterintuitive for a word like "Captialism" to have a slippery meaning with regards to regulation, so maybe we could agree on the following assertion:
--- Capitalism is an economic system that privileges private ownership over social intention ---
If that is acceptable, then I'd like to break it down from my perspective. My understanding of work has way more to do with (social) agency and (our) my ability to provide intentional value than it has to do navigating a bloated system that is undermined by corporate interests. Please note that I am most certainly not taking a cue from Europe on the economic situation in the U.S. as I think the landscape (literally) is a bit different.
If Capitalism can be demarcated by privileging private ownership and enterprise over social intention, I believe the value proposition is that the nature of competition will create social value (jobs that give people money to eat) as a side effect of producing and distributing "innovative" products that speak to social desires. (demand). If the company cannot be competitive, perhaps there is no demand, or they can't pay well, then it's accepted that the company probably shouldn't exist.
There is also a strong notion of individual agency, in which a motivated go-getter can work hard and do well for themselves and their family.
So, I think it's fair to say that the virtuous parts of Capitalism are the idea that anyone can pull themselves out of poverty, and the mechanic of self regulation, which speaks to the ability for Capitalism to eventually meet social intention in a roundabout way.
My assertion is that mechanic of Capitalism (competition) might eventually meet social intention eventually at first through the virtue of self regulation, but the further it drifts, the harder it this becomes.
Of course, we can slap some government, social welfare, and regulatory committees on it, so now social intention (which absolutely should be exercised by meaningful work) becomes contingent on voting every so often.
Meanwhile, wealth is aggregated into the top 10% or 1% of the population, and since people are not perfect, we end up with laws like money is considered free speech, so private interests end up having a dominant say in legislation. It is not surprising that the U.S. has a wildly polarized 2 party culture, when considering how bad the current system is for both parties.
If we have more of our individual agency deferred to government, then we have more taxes and less freedom. If we don't, people starve and/or literally die.
This mechanic is absolutely a double bind with no apparent answer, aside from rethinking the mechanic of the original value proposition.
I like paying taxes for streets and schools and welfare, even though I don't have kids. I don't like paying taxes to bail out large corporations and banks who (with the government's help) reduce our social agency in the first place. So yeah, one is not theft, but think the other absolutely is.
Contingency on government for social intention in a place where hostage politics, voter suppression, and gerrymandering are very *real* things, is not a good thing.
So in all, the critique is largely against the "effects" of advanced capitalism, but also the "competitive mechanic" that allowed it to get that way in the first place.
I don't think a collective mechanic like open source is the answer either, unless developers start privileging GPL.
No, that's anarcho-capitalism.
Monopolies restrict competition, obviously.
It's mostly orthogonal to capitalism. At best, you can say that open source is against intellectual capitalism, in the form of intellectual property. This is not a position on the ownership of physical goods.
It's only not a creator of wealth for merchantilist software companies that peddle something with less value.
What’s the end goal? What are we trying to achieve here?
The Uk on the other hand, now that it’s #out and took “are” country back will likely mandate spyware installed by default and “you’re” data made available to corpos by law - cctv installed in your homes by default and perhaps speakers to announce the great achievements of whoever the unelected prime minister of the time is.
People are just not that good at organizing in groups and information is too diverse to leave to individuals to categorize in blobby programs with arbitrary fields in hierarchical files and folders, so inconsistency and disconnected work is the result. This is at the height of its bad in government. Now we are at the point where AI can serve as a connector, with careful use (it would have been much better if organizing data had been the main priority of people). For example, referenced documents created by AI on data with a final group review, the perfect use case of efficient and effective AI integration. But Microsoft is at the top of that heap, in terms of information capture (even if it's not accessed by them directly), capability and authority. Meanwhile Open Source is still talking about a new desktop music player and how to use grep.