The thought was that the government would effectively become the largest employer of OSS developers who would then be compelled to follow directions or be out of a job. Would there be enough independent developers to review millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since none of the government protects can be trusted?

Could the government also dictate the operating system and software people use to make sure it is the state sponsored one? If I’m not mistaken some similar actions have happened in N Korea and China.

I’m not saying this is an inevitable outcome, but just trying to think of worst case scenarios. A lot of terrible things have started with good intentions.

> Would there be enough independent developers to review millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since none of the government protects can be trusted

That’s not far from how it is right now in OSS, even without governments in the chain. For example: how the xz back door was found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

You're saying that a state can upstream patches with planted backdoors. Thruth is, this is possible in all software. It's not specific to state-sponsored open source software. So your scenario is a reality whether you want it or not. And open source is not particularily vulnerable either. People forget this.

Now a lot of people would be angry if my state decided to spend money on security flaws. I imagine an elected representative try to explain how they wanted to misspend funds allocated to improve software and plant flaws instead. That would not go down well here or in Germany. Try to hire people for this in Germany and see how long you last till your little op is public.

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