Draft Legislation to End Federal Dependence on Insecure, Proprietary Software | Hacker News Reader

Draft Legislation to End Federal Dependence on Insecure, Proprietary Software

wyden.senate.gov

24 pointsrawgabbit7 comments

Counterexample, and the reason why there is so much emphasis on 'software bills of materials' and similar stuff recently: Log4j.

Fully open-source, packaged by many, many open-source (and closed-source) vendors. Had a widely-publicized series of terrible bugs which caused billions of actual losses, as in: "we had to pay to get this remediated and/or had to shut stuff down for a while, and that made us look bad, without anyone to sue."

Reducing that to "let's get rid of insecure, proprietary software" is a take, but not necessarily an accurate or helpful one...

If the buck stops with the government, doesn't that mean a corresponding government investment into the security and robustness of open source projects?

I think the second-order effects are precisely why this is interesting.

I’ll eat my hat if the Google and Amazon lobbyists let this even get remotely close to a vote.

Money runs this country, not the electorate. There’s far too much revenue involved in siphoning off government budgets to let this get anywhere near the congressional floor.

Clicked just to see if Wyden is involved. Of course he is

Microsoft is insecure, year of linux incoming.

Don't let anyone tell you Debian-family/Ubutntu/Mint for Desktop. These people are doing a 20 year old reflex reaction from the Canonical free CD era.

Fedora, OpenSUSE, up-to-date linux distros are better than Windows.

Debian-family, is probably not better than Windows 7-era Windows. Windows 11 is too easy to beat.

EDIT:

Justification: Debian-family uses an outdated Kernel. This means everything from software to hardware to drivers to codecs are outdated the moment you install it. Lots of terminal usage required to use a debian-family distro, if you can get it working at all. Most of the time, you will need to use an up-to-date distro on modern hardware.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Please provide justification for your points of view. People making value judgments without providing reasoning makes for boring reading. And boring reading is a high crime on HN.

Sorry. When you spend time in the linux world, you forget people don't know about "Debian-family is outdated".

Inside, its an awakening as people need to be redirected from the old advice to the modern advice.

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