Making open source publicly funded will inevitably grant governments more influence over it. Considering all the things that happened in the past decade, it's hard to trust governments to be good stewards of open source.
First of all, the xz incident should be reason to want less government involvement, not more. All publicly available evidence right now points to state actors behind the incident.
Time and time again, we've seen governments abuse technology to subvert democracy and human rights. They engage in illegal mass surveillance. They backdoor encryption standards. They hoard zero days behind our backs. They target journalists and human right advocates. They now even brazenly push for encryption bans and mandatory backdoors. All of these actions pose a serious threat to our society, and yet they're done with little to no oversight. Those responsible have faced no repercussions to date while those who exposed these things have faced retaliation.
Given our reliance on open source infrastructure, it's right that they're desperately in need of funding. However, exactly how we do that is a hard nut to crack.
First of all, the xz incident should be reason to want less government involvement, not more. All publicly available evidence right now points to state actors behind the incident.
Time and time again, we've seen governments abuse technology to subvert democracy and human rights. They engage in illegal mass surveillance. They backdoor encryption standards. They hoard zero days behind our backs. They target journalists and human right advocates. They now even brazenly push for encryption bans and mandatory backdoors. All of these actions pose a serious threat to our society, and yet they're done with little to no oversight. Those responsible have faced no repercussions to date while those who exposed these things have faced retaliation.
Given our reliance on open source infrastructure, it's right that they're desperately in need of funding. However, exactly how we do that is a hard nut to crack.