<story><title>&apos;Securing Open Source Software Act&apos; introduced to US Senate</title><url>https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/majority-media/peters-and-portman-introduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-help-secure-open-source-software_</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peteforde</author><text>Reading the comments so far, I&amp;#x27;m genuinely surprised that more folks haven&amp;#x27;t applied a &amp;quot;follow the money&amp;quot; lens to their analysis.&lt;p&gt;To me, it reads as a bald-faced attempt to discourage public sector entities from using OSS solutions, when in fact there are perfectly good and definitely &amp;gt;100% secure proprietary offerings that cost a reasonable amount when purchased from the sorts of vendors that pay lobbyists to &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; senators write OSS bills.&lt;p&gt;Do you honestly think Rob fucking Portman woke up one day with strong opinions about FOSS?&lt;p&gt;Make no mistake: this is a thinly veiled late-stage attempt to displace the growing dominance of OSS-based solutions to the sorts of problems that the government and military used to pay 8 and 9 figures a year to EDS to solve.&lt;p&gt;An actual, good-faith bill that seeks to address these issues would attempt to incentivize&amp;#x2F;punish orgs that use FOSS without making meaningful contributions to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kube-system</author><text>They&amp;#x27;re trying to destroy FOSS ...by hiring FOSS developers?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t buy it.  More like, log4j was an actual real big issue for government agencies because they use rely on tons of open source projects and haven&amp;#x27;t previously done much to make sure that that supply chain is robust.  This would help to change that.&lt;p&gt;Federal contractors don&amp;#x27;t need to sell proprietary software to make money -- they make more money selling FOSS software.</text></comment>
<story><title>&apos;Securing Open Source Software Act&apos; introduced to US Senate</title><url>https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/majority-media/peters-and-portman-introduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-help-secure-open-source-software_</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peteforde</author><text>Reading the comments so far, I&amp;#x27;m genuinely surprised that more folks haven&amp;#x27;t applied a &amp;quot;follow the money&amp;quot; lens to their analysis.&lt;p&gt;To me, it reads as a bald-faced attempt to discourage public sector entities from using OSS solutions, when in fact there are perfectly good and definitely &amp;gt;100% secure proprietary offerings that cost a reasonable amount when purchased from the sorts of vendors that pay lobbyists to &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; senators write OSS bills.&lt;p&gt;Do you honestly think Rob fucking Portman woke up one day with strong opinions about FOSS?&lt;p&gt;Make no mistake: this is a thinly veiled late-stage attempt to displace the growing dominance of OSS-based solutions to the sorts of problems that the government and military used to pay 8 and 9 figures a year to EDS to solve.&lt;p&gt;An actual, good-faith bill that seeks to address these issues would attempt to incentivize&amp;#x2F;punish orgs that use FOSS without making meaningful contributions to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buscoquadnary</author><text>Ehh, I don&amp;#x27;t disagree with where you start but I do with where you end.&lt;p&gt;If it is a money thing then it probably has more to do setting up &amp;quot;standards&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;compliance&amp;quot; requirements that you must me to use FOSS software in the government. Then federal contractors and other big FOSS organizations repackage their existing solution as &amp;quot;Government ISO-MITRE, PCI, Whatever-BS-Acronym-we-can-come-up-with&amp;quot; compliant and charge a premium over something they already sale.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think this will hurt FOSS, at the end of the day FOSS is nothing more than someone saying &amp;quot;here&amp;#x27;s something I wrote or whatever.&amp;quot; and sharing it, anything that tries to make more than that isn&amp;#x27;t talking about FOSS anymore.</text></comment>