The sabotage scenario is perhaps less likely than the alternative scenario of industrial and political espionage.

There are also practical advantages: the ability to fix a bug in-house instead of waiting for a technology giant from another continent.

Governments have more to gain from being able to work with a few big companies on things like surveillance than they do from sovereignty - which many of them regard as an out of date idea anyway.

Despite all the talk about sovereign cloud the actual governments are actually going the other way.

1. The Online Safety Act in the UK pushes people to use big tech more rather than run stuff independently - the forums that moved to social media. 2. EU regulatory requirements that help the incumbents:https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/cispe_eu_sovereignty_... 3. ID apps in multiple countries that require installs from Google or Apple stores, and only run on their platforms. 4. The push to cashless which means increased reliance on Visa, Mastercard, Apple and Google.

To be clear I do not not think that any of these things are in the public interest. However the government is not the public, and the public (and probably a lot of the government) has deeply ingrained learned helplessness about technology.

Today when a government pushes for a backdoor we often see companies push back. The FBI publicly complained about iMessage encryption a lot, and currently Apple is also telling the government of India they aren’t going to install their “security” software… those are just a couple examples.

What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?

> Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

This is the business model of Quansight Labs, whose employees help maintain much of the scientific python stack. Mostly tech companies, not governments, sponsoring the work

Similar opinion and source of income.

Linux for starters, however even that has too many US contributions.

In general, we need to go back to the cold war days, multiple OSes and programming languages governed by international standards, with local vendors.

If sovereignty is desired, it can't stop at Office packages.

I doubt that Microsoft has a kill switch. Though through automatic updates they still have pretty strong sabotage capabilities.

But the OS is not where Microsofts power lies. Its in exchange (almost everywhere cloud managed, including for many governments) and SharePoint, with a small amount of teams, where Microsoft is truly a scary prospect for sovereignty.

I have a possibly strange take.

Isn't the code of law the original open source, for very good reason?

As law becomes more and more enforced by software, should it not all be required to be open source?

I feel like there should be an open project to manage and support this.

I think governance (both public and private) would benefit from open tools to manage communities at scale via technology.

"the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software."

wait until they found out that there is no "customer service" in OSS, sometimes the project is fine but people need "someone" to be held accountable in some ways

that's why a lot of OSS project never take flight

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Prudent to assume that the same is possible with Linux.

I agree, but it also feels like it would be so difficult. It requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so people are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks to be a big blocker when adopting open source tech) and finally Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against it. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to actively sabotage any adoption.