alt Hacker News> despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators.
But despite that, they exist today, successfully so, and continue being funded by the very people you claim they should stay away from.
I'm not sure if you looked into how this whole "funding FOSS" thing works like, but governments are not opening a fund, letting any FOSS developer expense stuff to it and calling it a day. Usually they contract a company to work on things, that then end up FOSS.
Even if the end result is FOSS or not, they have the same people they can blame if they want to, the people they paid for certain results. The license of the finished thing doesn't change who's responsible for doing the job they've been paid to do.
I think until you actually understanding how the funding works, it would be fair to avoid doing flippant comments who basically only try to add some fuel to some fire, with some completely out of place comparison to a NK Linux distribution.
The funding mechanism isn't really the point, its the product that comes after.
Sure, the EU contracts developers to build features they want, but when those requirements start coming from regulatory mandates rather than user needs, you're not just adding features to Ubuntu anymore.
You're forking it into something fundamentally different.
"EUbuntu"? :)
Look at how the EU handles tech regulations:
- GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.
- AI legislation; lets wait and see
- Digital sovereignty; fundamentally trying to gain access control for EU citizens data from Google and Apple.
Anyways, let's see what happens. Maybe I'm being too cynical and they'll just become savvy end-users of existing distros. But given the pattern, I'm not holding my breath.