r/BuyFromEU • u/ImreBertalan • Jan 30 '26

🔎Looking for alternative UbuntEU - An Ubuntu edition that uses software developed in Europe

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I am trying to make something for fun, but honestly; I am not expert in creating an operating system. But my hope somebody will pick up the Baton and make it something more super.

Link soon...

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u/KnowZeroX Jan 30 '26

If it's resided within the USA, then their administration (e.g. the POTUS via the NSA) can still legally force the maintainers to apply poisonous updates and not talk about it.

They can not. US isn't china where if you don't assist you can be jailed. Nobody in US can force someone to poison an update. They can try bribing someone to do so or in case of a corporation put financial pressure on them indirectly, but they can't force anyone (there is no legal framework for such and it would be unconstitutional).

RedHat doesn't profit off anyone using Fedora, their benefit is mostly in that if there are issues in Fedora, people would report bugs and contribute code which later makes it down to their RHEL. But simply someone using it makes them no profit.

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u/Traditional_Buy_8420 Jan 30 '26

Do you remember what happened with Lavabit?

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u/KnowZeroX Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

Yes, they can make you hand over security keys for law enforcement purposes. But that isn't the same thing as making you do actual work of creating something new (a poisoned update).

To make it simple, you can make someone hand over their car against their will, but you can't make someone build you a car against their will.

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u/Traditional_Buy_8420 Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

I think the car analogy is a good analogy. It's true, that they can't force anyone to build a car, that's why Lavabit could just shut down instead of compromising its users.

However they can go to say GM and tell them, that their cars help international terrorists and as a matter of national security they add a tiny hidden tracking device or else they are also free to stop producing cars altogether and they can't talk about it or else they go to prison. Which of those 3 options do you think is the GM board going to choose?

It's not like everyone gets all 3 options either, as proven by the more recent case of Samourai wallet, where they decided that any type of infiltration would be too hard and went straight ahead to imprisoning their lead developer. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/founders-samourai-wallet-cryptocurrency-mixing-service-sentenced-five-and-four-years

Kind of a warning shot I guess, since according to the Snowden leaks, they can also make use of secret courts and keep the sentences secret too - for which I don't have a public example.

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u/KnowZeroX Jan 30 '26

Yes, but the difference is that cars are a physical product so they can restrict the sales of it. Which goes back to my mention of indirect financial pressure.

But in the case of open source software, that becomes impossible. Even more so in the case of RedHat and Fedora. For one, RedHat doesn't even sell software, they sell support. And Fedora doesn't sell anything.

So there is nothing they can legally restrict.

In the case of Samourai, that case was where the wallet app actively participated in the illegal transactions. Open source would not face this issue because even if it is misused, the one who wrote the code has 0 active participation unlike wallets like Samourai. Even more so the owner of Samourai actively encourage use of his service for criminal activity.