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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

The guy holding this talk apparently does this:

> NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative.

with the Next Generation Internet thing at the end receiving money/financing from the political supra-state entity called the EU [1] . So I guess said speech-holder is not happy because political entities which are seen by the EU as adversarial are also using open-source code? Not sure how war plays into this, as I’m sure he must be aware of the hundreds of billions of euros the EU has allocated for that.

[1] https://ngi.eu/

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One way war plays into FOSS is that enemy nations are no longer supposed to be contributing to the same projects, being from nationality XYZ is now as relevant as programming skills one has to offer, likewise open source software from specific countries might no longer be allowed.

I imagine anytime the people that control the war resources decide to use them, there are plenty of other people not interested or involved in the destruction. If the UK declares war on an African nation tomorrow, since the US is an ally you would say those other people in the US should disallow devs from the target African nation from contributing to their project?

Who knows, you can already see this by the nations that are blocked to access Github.

You are engaging with a russian troll larping as Bulgarian/Moldovan whatever. Look through his messages: it's all about Ukraine and EU, inclusing reposts from ruzzian propaganda subreddit etc. They are not arguing in good faith.

Michiel is indeed one of the driving forces behind NLNet's NGI0 program. That said, just because they're distributing money they received from the EU, that doesn't mean that they're intimately aware of the full EU budget.

(Disclosure: I once received NGI0 funding.)

> that doesn't mean that they're intimately aware of the full EU budget.

There's no "intimate" knowledge required in order to be aware of the EU spending tens to hundreds of billions of euros on the war close to its Eastern border, it has been one of the main topics of discussion in the media for a good time now. Unless this speech holder has lived under a rock since February 2022, which doesn't seem to be the case (he was the one mentioning the "war" thing).

Yes, this is the real problem when USians and Europeans complain about FOSS/OS safety. They understand deeply that the FOSS system is an extension of US soft power using the tech sector and any indication that the existence of FOSS is a threat to the US' interests means that it's values must be destroyed because these people don't really believe in the things they say they do

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