who would have thought ๐
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Meanwhile in Mexico:
Frankly I'm surprised they fund any of those in the first place. I would have thought F-Droid would be a bit less shit if it has actual employees!
I mean, why would a government benefit from funding something like that? Also no large funding means no fear of doing something that the government won't like. And with the size of anti-Trump movements, it's probably a good thing.
For the record, I still don't really like this decision.
Ideally government actions should benefit the society at large. Government is not a company, it's a community service for the people.
That will never happen in the US though, at least without major incidents that are beneficial for citizens' personality development (yes it means making people suffer).
Oh shit. Why did I immediately think of the NTP guy. Should we check in on him, is he OK?
The who now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills ? He passed last year.
Aw. Shit.
What about him? The Wikipedia page seems pretty normal at first glance.
Years ago it came to light that NTP (and OpenSSL if I remember right) were being run by like.. one dude (4 staff for OpenSSL?) on the tiniest trickle of donations, despite how vital the service was. It's a long time since I became aware so I may have misremembered.
- Encryption technology is best done in the open for security reasons
- Linux is a widely used operating system as is all of its GNU components and many other open source projects in that ecosystem are important for national security
- languages like python, rust, etc are open source and generate significant economic innovation.
Really just a lot of things.
Are you sure you're in infosec?
I don't see this comment having much to do with mine so I'll consider it a bait.
why would a government benefit from funding something like that?
And I give 3 reasons.
So where am I missing relevance?
Your reasons don't really give the government financial advantage imo. If the projects are big, they will find funding anyways.
The primary interest of government is not itself as a business, it's the national security of the nation. So #1 and #2 are definitely that. The secondary interest of the government is the prosperity of its people, which in our country is measured via economic growth. #3 supports that, as does many open source projects, because open source is frequently the foundation of many buisnesses, who don't have much personal altruistic motivation to give back, but financially prosper off the venture significantly. The government, in one view, handles the tragedy of the commons of such projects for the economic prosperity of the tech sector, which gives them military and prosperity advantages via having those sectors within their borders. They also handle the abstract and uncertain nature of the profit motive for such ventures, just as they handle the funding of research in medicine, military, fundamental physics, early computer, communications, and space tech. The economy, fundamentally, is not the best answer for everything.
The more right-wingers fundamentally see the government as a business, the less they factually know or even can understand about how the world works.
"For the record, I still don't like this particular face-eating incident." As if you aren't a leopard enthusiast. Who cares whether you like something?
Because on FOSS social networks if you personally like something that's not leftist, you'll get banned in a week at most.
FOSS social networks are literally perfect for specialized instances. There could be a incel, nazi, or libertarian instance just like there is lemmygrad. They'd probably get defederated, but so do the real leftist instances. They could form their own federation. They'd be completely free to moderate themselves as they see fit.
I know that and it's a good thing. But FOSS networks are unable to be general and all inclusive. That's what I'm usually talking about and something I feel like they lie about.
You can be right wing in FOSS networks.
There's two things you can't do (at least if you want to keep a community healthy):
- Break the rules of the network (which are usually things like: don't spam, don't scam, "Wheaton's Law", etc...).
- Be so unpleasant to be around that others don't want to be around you.
There are cases of those who dehumanise others (e.g. racists, anti-trans, literal nazis, etc...) who get banned because they're doing the two things you can't do. But in those cases they're not banned because they're right wing, they're banned because those actions break communities, so the community has to ban them to continue existing.
You really have weird priorities, fellow internet user.