this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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It's high time open source projects and anything to do with software freedom and privacy relocated outside of the US. It wasn't great before that a lot of them are hosted in the US, but now it's urgent. It's not even a matter of principle anymore.
I'm not sure I see the urgency? Plenty of organizations in the US love free software, OSU wouldn't be providing hosting if they didn't. Additionally most of Europe isn't exactly a bastion of privacy. There are certainly exceptions, notably Switzerland but the majority isn't that much better if you ask me. I'm also not entirely sure how privacy is all that relevant to where websites and source code is hosted, these projects aren't storing personal information. I think the important thing is that these projects are hosted and that funding is found. Where they're hosted is mostly irrelevant.
It means that a project isn't hosted on a country that is actively hostile towards the libre software movement. Privacy is dependent on the country, because e.g. the NSA may try to backdoor projects hosted in the US more than in other countries.
What has the US government actively done to harm FOSS? Last I knew they contributed to and maintained several high profile FOSS projects. The NSA maintains Ghidra and other US agencies fund and contribute to tor.
Also while I do agree that the NSA is more likely to approach US based organizations and US citizens to include back doors willingly it doesn't stop them from attempting to covertly get back doors in place. Additionally let's not pretend like the US 3 letter agencies don't have agreements in place with their European counter parts to do cross border shenanigans. It's known that they do.