Hacker News Reader

Comment by jowea | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me that finds it weird the EU, and specially Russia/China/Iran don't strongly support OS and/or Linux for that reason?

View on HN

At least for the EU, i can understand. Managing infrastructure is not somethign the brusselo-cracy does, like not at all. They do regulation well, and lobbying management, so they are solely focusing on that.

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 EU has their own mastodon instance at least. Only for official accounts but it means they are part of the federated network

Then why are they spending so much on facebook ads: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/

Of course a government needs to run its ads/PSAs where its people actually are, even if they are trying to promote alternatives.

Not to mention the surveillance potential of government run email and document servers. Oh, and AI chatbots too. People will just give you everything you could ever want to know about them, and plenty about those around them too ("my coworker told me that she got an abortion"). They should be giddy at this opportunity!

China does support FOSS, the government even directly runs the Chinese equivalent of github, gitee.com

For the EU, its lobbying and the internia caused by the fact that all businesses are bought into commercial software ecosystem. Don’t know why China and Iran though - agree it would make sense. Russia too.

We haven't, because until recently we were all friends, so no one ever thought Europe would be prevented to use American technologies.

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.

Linux is American software. How would they support it? They do have their own Linux distributions and derivatives. But contributing might be problematic, both from sending side (you're helping Americans, you're traitor) and from receiving side (can't accept contributions from Russians, might contain backdoors or might violate sanctions, not safe).

I hate to be a GNU-Linux pedant, but isn't it GNU that's American, while Linux (the kernel) is European?

Linux Foundation is a US nonprofit[0], maybe that's what they're getting at? /shrug

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation

Counting by contributions, most are from US companies. Only Huawei is a notable exception. Linus is an American citizen, AFAIK. Linux Foundation is US company.

I don't think nationality is that important for FOSS. I can see why cooperating with the original efforts centred in the USA/Europe might be problematic, but there's little stopping those governments from copying the code and working on it internally. And might contain backdoors or might violate sanctions" is the exact reason those countries should be thinking about it!

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Operating_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALT_Linux

We can always fork the last version, and then carry on with EU Linux, or whatever.

As a 70's child, present times are starting to look like cold war times home computers.

Sorry to ask, but where do you get your "facts" ????

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.

My apologies I only bothered to update myself and see those things you mentioned after posting. My only vague recollections were of news articles about massive install bases of outdated pirated MS Windows and occasional well publicized but ultimately minor efforts like the Munich thing.

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.

It is easier to use *BSD for something like that. It is smaller, more consistent, you are not forced to release your changes...

The idea that any of those countries would care at all about license terms is laughable though. China in particular had such a large pirated Windows install base, that Microsoft realized they needed to keep releasing updates lest they want an endless botnet on their hands (might also do substantial damage to manufacturing infrastructure).

Contract can be international and are enforceable! It would be a huge problem for possible future exports, if there was liability with GPLv2 violations!

Microsoft would rather China run on mostly pirated Windows than on Linux.

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.

>> It is smaller, more consistent, you are not forced to release your changes...

They're trying to move away from proprietary software, not create more of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com