[ale] Holy Cyber-Commies Batman! -or- Now two major powers (cyber-warfare combatants) moving government to open source.

[glallen01 at gmail.com (George Allen)]

First China switching it's military to FreeBSD:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=1682
and now apparently, Russia with Linux:
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2010/12/putin-orders-russian-move-to-gnulinux.html

It's a bit disturbing that these announcements both have huge security
implications, and almost no public mention. On the most simple
analysis possible - they're diversifying away from windows as the
standard bot-net/virus platform. Not to mention any of the benefits of
government-open-source relative to intellectual property and IT
security.

I think the U.S. would be wise to take China's lead with FreeBSD - the
license would allow us to fork it and make any private changes we want
to contract for whatever system. This was my first guess as to why
China chose FreeBSD rather than Linux, because they can own it.

Wonder how long we'll keep buying licenses for this stuff with the
public trust? Like building privately owned toll-roads with
tax-dollars except not as publicly obvious.
(Texan's didn't like that too much:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2733044020070427)