US restricts Windows exports to Chinese/Russian/Venezuelan military and police

Re:US restricts Windows exports to Chinese/Russian/Venezuela... by fuoqi on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @01:25AM (#23686846)

Russian military has preemptively started migration to Astra Linux[0] in 2018 and some say that police forces gradually migrate to it as well. So overall, I think these restrictions will be a really great motivation for those (and other) countries to built government digital infrastructure fully independent from US commercial products and instead embrace open source and domestic products.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux

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Re:US restricts Windows exports to Chinese/Russian/Venezuela... by r8ru4rbfhfu on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @04:15AM (#23687897)

I'm not really sure "Better for freely oppressing your people." is a feather I wanted in the open source cap.

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Re:US restricts Windows exports to Chinese/Russian/Venezuela... by fuoqi on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @04:41AM (#23688026)

It does not matter much if Chinese mass surveillance system works on Linux or Windows, or if a racist US cop fills his report after killing a black guy in MS Office or in Libre, or if a Russian weapon system uses Linux embedded kernel instead of a proprietary one developed domestically. It's just a tool.

At least with open source widely used in a government sector we would get more investments in OSS (direct and indirect, e.g. by training people), thus in the long run resulting in a better software for everyone. And we would not get pathetic vendor lock-ins, which hurt everyone except the vendor company.

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Re:US restricts Windows exports to Chinese/Russian/Venezuela... by nix23 on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @06:04AM (#23688472)

I tested AstraLinux and the GUI is blazing fast! Then i try d to find the sources for the Desktop and failed ;(

But it works very well!

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