this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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The world should wake up from tech dependence. Let the EU massively invest in FOSS.

Edit: as raised by comments, my title was not incorrect but did omit that it's actually the US that imposed sanctions, to which MS chose to comply. Changed the title.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?

The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking. Yes, you can go spill a gallon of ink talking about how American software companies have been the tip of the spear for intelligence gathering, propagandizing, and sabotage. But I would say that an international business with a huge future stake in European implementation of their software spiking a criminal court's Outlook servers over prosecution of an ongoing genocide is a new low.

Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years.

Open source is a far cry from bulletproof. We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration of an email distribution agent. But then the assumption is that the Israelis - being heavily integrated into the European socio-economic system - are on Europe's side. Similarly, Microsoft and Google are supposed to be agents of the Big Friendly American Security State. The thing that shields you from the evil Slavs and Huns and Muslims, not the thing that stabs you in the back.

Part of this is corruption (Big Tech lobbyists effectively bribing public official to adopt their software), part of it is laziness (corporate sales reps go out of their way to make early adoption relatively easy and backload the real costs until later), part of it is the networking effect (thanks to the above there is an abundance of Microsoft-centric IT companies and experienced users who have already adapted to the privatized frameworks).

But this isn't a problem you can simply explain your way out of. Ultimately, you need a structural change in how these institutions do business. You need ICC that has insourced its IT and is capable of self-administration, rather than a bunch of outsourced flunkies who exist as a way to pad a contractor's wallet. You need a public that is adopting good IT practices at the grade school level, rather than feeding at the trough of private subsidies and philanthropies to defer the up front cost of technical education. You need an IT community that is well-organized and unionized and hostile to the corporate model of development and distribution of for-profit systems. Not a bunch of freelancers that see Microsoft Certification as a meal ticket.

But 90% of people simply don’t care even just a little.

90% of people (honestly closer to 99.9% of people) don't believe they have any say over IT policies at their own offices, much less at the scale of the a trans-national criminal court.

They do not genuinely believe they live in a democratic institution and roll over in compliance for fear of some form of reprisal, because that's how they've been trained to behave from their earliest days of life.

It isn't a matter of caring nearly so much as it is a matter of learned helplessness.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking.

Yes, but they do many other types of shenanigans that are against the interest of their users. Like snooping, and lock in attempts, stifling competition and charging high prices for services that cost next to nothing to deliver. Those things are completely apart from the fact that you have zero control with the software, or insight into back doors or other security issues.

We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration

WTF? Talk about a straw man argument! There's a reason some of the most demanding and sensitive tasks are completely dominated by Linux. Stock exchanges is is one example of that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

WTF? Talk about a straw man argument!

That's not what a strawman argument is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It's exactly what it is, you build a strawman and then argue against it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

you build a strawman

You think Mossad is a strawman?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

No, the argument you pulled out of no where that Mossad will deploly backdoors in open source is the strawman, the implication being open source bad, m'kay. Could they ? Of course but thats an entire separate argument.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

the argument you pulled out of no where

Who do you think promoted Microsoft to pull the ICC's email access?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

A strawman is when you take someone else's argument and you represent it as weaker than it really is. By definition their statement was not a strawman.

It also does not appear to be an implication that OSS is a Mossad backdoor, only that the possibility is present. I presume this is based on the fact that Mossad has done this kind of supply-chain attack before (see the Iranian nuclear program, or the Hezbollah pagers) and that there have been multiple recent controversies about code inserted into OSS packages.

OSS is still the way to go, but we need better governance and best practices in a lot of organizations to make that happen. In fact if the FOSS community would help provide training and certification in this realm, it would help deal with many of these concerns.