It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.

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rzerowan 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Funnily enough there is some level of control that can be exerted by the US gov via the distros (at least the major ones - see legalese restrictions on Redhat/Ubuntu etc when you want to download , stating the various US gov laws/sanctions that they follow) and also via the kernel - i think some time back Russian kernel maintainers were removed.

So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.

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roblabla 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Europe has a major distro in the form of SUSE, so that’s not too worrying.

Even if upstream linux banned european contributors, there are enough european contributors that a fork would just emerge. So I’m really not too worried about that happening.

	▲	Symbiote 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Two if you mean Europe more generally, as Ubuntu is British.