I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.
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.
Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.
Yes, but bureaucracies make this impossible. If you have worked at a bank before, you'll know how difficult it is to make a change to some in-house piece of software. And that's a bank, not a gov't institution. Think how much more friction there will be in the latter.
The culture can only change when it actually becomes possible to make any changes to the systems.
If all the software one institution uses comes in the form of proprietary binaries, there is simply no need to even think about making policies about fixing those systems in-house.
These institutions don’t bother making fixes where they can, so it seems unlikely that giving them more options will change much. Ironically, things like windows auto-update being the default probably actually help their IT departments maintain some level of security
Yeah and it is better. Most things can be updated without a reboot and even for the kernel, you can either live-patch it (not always possible) or reboot only the kernel.
At a certain size (and government departments are absolutely large enough) it makes sense to manage software deployment centrally, from an internal package repository/cache.
Once that’s in place, the process for populating that repository can easily adopt locally modified versions of upstream software: defaults changed, bugs removed, features added, etc.
No one in a big business/government blinks at changing group policies for internal deployment. Changing the code is really very little different once the ability to do so is internalized.
I wonder if it is in fact easier in a German region than a bank though. A bank has massive compliance complications, where the state insists on rules being met, so their are teams of people trying to make sure no rules being broken, and therefore anti-change. Germany is a Federal system, and the region has law making powers, a bit like a US state. Therefore it can set the rules to make sure migration to a new system happens. If big fixes are not allowed, they have themselves to blame. At a bank it is the state causing the friction.
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?
How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or activate kill-switches? Maybe Linus controls Linux, but can he "flick a switch and kill" any running kernels? He might be able to insert backdoors, but will they go unnoticed? Would anyone be forced to install them? Just patch the code to remove the backdoor.
I feel that you wrote some words that only seem to make sense if we don't think about them too much.
> How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or activate kill-switches?
A government can control a piece of open source software the same way a big tech company does - with economies of scale. In other words, by throwing more money, resources, and warm bodies at their open source projects than anybody else.
The code itself might be under an open license, but project governance is free to remain self-interested and ignorant of the needs of the "community."
Any pull request accepted from outside isn't a mutual exchange of developer labor for the benefit of all, but the company successfully tricking an outside developer into doing free work for them.
Any pull request that runs counter to the interests of the company can and will be ignored or rejected, no matter how much effort was put into it or how much it would benefit other users.
Any hostile forks are going to be playing a catch-up game, as community efforts cannot outpace the resources of most large companies.
As long as upstream is open source, forks can just keep syncing. At some point, the upstream will then usually switch to open core, or some sort of delayed open source, but often that leads to people leaving for the open forks, hopefully donating to them, too.
(Gentle reminder to subscribe to donate to a FOSS project or two that you use.)
Because in my experience, the projects that I can think of that switch to open core are those that are started by smaller businesses when a large multinational tech company starts to mess with their revenue streams.
In that case, I don't fault them in the slightest. As a matter of fact, I think these days it's now a sucker's bet to build a company around an open source product. Free software? Maybe. Source available or open core from the start? Possibly. A fully permissive license that in the outside chance my product is successful, suddenly puts me in competition with Amazon and Microsoft, so they can kill my business with my own software? Forget about it.
Yeah, I don’t fault them either. It’s a shitty situation to find yourself in. That said... they went with a permissive license, so they knew what they’re getting into.
I think the main reason they do that is because AGPL is a turnoff for a noticeable chunk of corporate users, and you do want those users. Dual licensing should work here in theory, and does work in practice for some – no idea why we don’t see it more often. (I have a project-not-quite-startup-anymore [1] under AGPL, but I do keep around a CLA for outside contributors just in case.)
Linux is not a smart target. But OpenOffice, nextcloud, postfix, those are much easier targets for developer coercion to compromise widely installed software that is important for "linux on the desktop". Ah and ofcourse also the desktop environments, and perhaps systemD are all in a privileged position with much less eyes on.
The thought was that the government would effectively become the largest employer of OSS developers who would then be compelled to follow directions or be out of a job. Would there be enough independent developers to review millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since none of the government protects can be trusted?
Could the government also dictate the operating system and software people use to make sure it is the state sponsored one? If I’m not mistaken some similar actions have happened in N Korea and China.
I’m not saying this is an inevitable outcome, but just trying to think of worst case scenarios. A lot of terrible things have started with good intentions.
> Would there be enough independent developers to review millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since none of the government protects can be trusted
You're saying that a state can upstream patches with planted backdoors. Thruth is, this is possible in all software. It's not specific to state-sponsored open source software. So your scenario is a reality whether you want it or not. And open source is not particularily vulnerable either. People forget this.
Now a lot of people would be angry if my state decided to spend money on security flaws. I imagine an elected representative try to explain how they wanted to misspend funds allocated to improve software and plant flaws instead. That would not go down well here or in Germany. Try to hire people for this in Germany and see how long you last till your little op is public.
Maybe. I highly doubt Apple or any other company isn’t complying in some way.
It’s been widely speculated that there are gentleman’s agreements where strategic bugs do not get fixed. To apple’s credit, unlike say BlackBerry, they designed iMessage where many of the intercept methods are tamper evident.
Apple sit behind the most corrupt US President in history at its inauguration, donated to a ball room and millions of dollars for other unspecified purposes. Is your argument that they will not fold...or that the backdoor is already in place ? :-)
Flicking that switch would be pretty much a one time deal. Not likely.
What would happen instead, and has happened in the past, is Microsoft (or juniper, etc) leaving a remote vulnerability unpatched while certain groups use that exploit. It's much more deniable. So deniable, that it's impossible to say for certain that it was intentional.
It's more practical to audit FOSS systems for bugs than a Microsoft solution, and the tools for doing so are open source and getting even better every day. Like you said, sharing the burden helps with cost: It also helps with the trust issue. Going one step further, formally verified software solutions are possible (and exist!). Good luck getting that from Microsoft, they ship a calculator that needs updates and internet access to run.
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.
It caches your credentials so you can still login offline. But you do need to be online when you're logging into your PC for the first time, post-install.
There are some unofficial hacks to bypass the online account requirement, but MS have been actively stamping these out. Now the current situation isn't like it's impossible to bypass this, mind you (as far as I'm aware there's at least a couple of workarounds), but normal users won't know/care and will end up just creating an online account.
Not quite. Because that requires pushing an update and only hits those who have windows automatic updates enabled. A lot of companies run those updates on a slight delay, which means they have a decent enough window to block such an update.
Microsoft is a big thing to worry about when it comes to independence from the emerging fascist government of the US. But not because 'they can shut off windows'.
The short-term fear should be in enterprise cloud (See ICC judges). The long-term pain lies in blocking security updates (As happened to Russia). One might worry about malicious updates being pushed, but the legal grounds for that are flimsy to non-existent, and Microsoft has very strong business reasons to push back. So even the trump administration would be smart enough to instead target the cloud solutions. Since the legal precedent is very clear and well lubricated "providing services to sanctioned entities", and the business impact is equally crippling.
They absolutely have. They force upgrade computers to Windows 11, which then won't boot, because the system doesn't actually support it. I guess they also have a smoother way to achieve that. They are also cases where an update broke the booting process, so the bitlocker key was lost. Everything is encrypted with it by default, and the only copy sits on a MS server connected with you MS account. Guess what happens when they say sorry, we can't just give you that key...
> 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
"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
Microsoft pledged not to intervene like that again, reclassifying its legal interpretation of its own services, and added language to its contracts to guarantee that it would fight future US attempts to do so:
When the US manages to force Microsoft to do something, it responds by trying to protect itself from the same scenario in the future. Because it wants profits. The ICC leaving Microsoft is the last thing Microsoft wanted.
None of that has anything to do with whether Microsoft is trying to assist the government. The cloud companies are doing what they can to protect themselves against these government actions.
> The cloud companies are doing what they can to protect themselves against these government actions.
No, they are doing what they can to convince customers that they are trying to protect themselves against government actions.
In fact its all smoke and mirrors. See the second link. AWS have admitted that the Cloud Act does allow the US government to compel access to French data.
Lengthy contracts between nation-states and corporations, developed and reviewed by teams of lawyers, and enforced by judges, are not exactly "pinky promises."
They will become pinky promises, once Microsoft gets ordered to do something by orange man or some three letters. There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US. It basically doesn't matter what they have in contracts, as US law or just political power with access to enforce that power trumps (ha) any contracts they can sign.
> There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US.
Actually there is, that's what the entire point of the sovereign clouds are. They reside physically in Europe, with legal control by Europeans, and European employees that can't be bossed around by the US. If the US orders Amazon to retrieve data from S3 servers located in a European sovereign cloud, Amazon employees in the US don't have the technical capability to do so, and the European data center employees are legally bound not to.
If those employees were working in a vacuum, then sure, but in reality they are not.
Employees have bosses and those bosses have bosses, and those bosses have bosses in the US. If not direct bosses, then at least people higher up in the context of all of Microsoft, who can pull strings, criticize them, categorize them as unreliable, and make their life hard, or even bring into motion that they are made to give up their position or are let go. Most people don't want a hard life at the job and be bullied. It is likely, that people joining Microsoft don't have the strongest moral compass anyway, so them sticking their neck out for European data protection, and losing what comfy life they have, including probably exceptional ...
Company politics are not to be underestimated. The question becomes who selects and vetoes higher ups in those sovereign clouds.
European governments cannot trust US companies, even when they have inner-EU parts, because influence from the US cannot be rules out.
"Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty:
Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin"
No, you have it 100% backwards. I'm saying Microsoft is incentivized to not allow interference, and this is strengthened by the fact that when a government forced interference, it took steps to strengthen itself against future interference.
So in light of that actual evidence, yes I am calling it conspiracy thinking to suggest that Microsoft has built in some kind of kill switch to make it easier for the government to do things that are against its corporate interest. Because that's literally what it is -- imagining some kind of conspiracy where Microsoft wants to help the US government, instead of its own bottom line.
Explain to me what's problematic about that?
And whatever you think about the arguments on either side, snark is absolutely a problem on HN. We can't have civil, productive discussions with it, and if you say it's "the least problematic thing here", then that's part of the problem too. Let's be better than that, how about?
There's zero evidence that Microsoft could shut down computers across a nation. Zilch. Nada. None.
Meanwhile, OP asserted they are "sure" Microsoft could do it at the "flick of a switch". Under orders from the US government.
That's absurd. If that's not conspiracy thinking, I don't know what is. A literal conspiracy between the two entities. When something is actually conspiracy thinking, you're allowed to label it as such, you know? You're trying to police ideas here, and that's entirely inappropriate. Be better.
They can (and will) switch off individual accounts from the US if the government asks them, and this has been demonstrated earlier this year.
No, they haven’t coded a “country-wide kill kill-switch” but having the ability to kill individual accounts, and being in a jurisdiction that demands accounts to be disabled from time to time is equivalent to having such a thing.
Also: Remember that several US organizations, including Github, have disabled thousands of accounts from eg Iran in the past is such maneuvers.
So: definitely feasible and has definitely happened in the past, with or without the mythical kill switch you talk of.
> No, they haven’t coded a “country-wide kill kill-switch” but having the ability to kill individual accounts, and being in a jurisdiction that demands accounts to be disabled from time to time is equivalent to having such a thing.
That's preposterous. Disabling a couple of online accounts, versus disabling the computers of an entire nation, you think are the same thing?
I don't understand how you can make that argument in good faith. What are you even trying to achieve?
Also, how about less snark about the "news in my jurisdiction"? Since the first amendment provides more press freedoms than many European countries have.
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.
This excuse is as old as the hills and I've been hearing it since the late 90s, but historically there has been exactly zero training between versions of Office or Windows that changed a lot of the interface overnight. Office workers just kept using them like the rest of the planet.
Not to mention companies who moved on to Google Docs or the web version of Office. Or companies who moved to MacOS 15-10 years ago.
In my state back home the entire workforce moved to LibreOffice and, according to my sister (a government worker), everyone is doing fine. Recently I saw a German government worker using Office to produce a document and she mentioned that she "barely knows how to use it" and "just knows how to load templates, fill and print".
This hypothetical problem of "needs training" only seems to exist when you mention the words "open source".
> - 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 think everyone agrees the costs are high, especially beyond monetary ones, but this stance on avoiding these costs is slowly pushing everyone into finding out how expensive is not having sovereignty.
Through its tech industry the US has over time acquired too much power over critical digital infrastructure that has already compromised governments. We know of Presidents/PMs/Legislators spied upon through their phones and computers, and also Microsoft itself involved in revoking email access to the ICC's chief prosecutor as retaliation/defense against investigations.
Sovereignty is too important for government, and since everyone needs to do it and get security right going for open-source with funded development and constant auditing is in my mind the only way.
The employees don't care about software sovereignty. They just want to do their jobs and get their paychecks. Fail to win them over and the transition will fail as well.
Qt has many good features, but it is not as robust as Visual Studio. It can lock up while debugging. <F2> will take you to the extern in the same module, not the actual definition. Variable expansion during debugging is slow.
You can’t display a.b.c, you have to expand all of ‘a’, then all of ‘a.b’
Computers and software used to be extremely expensive about 30 years ago, yet private industry advanced the state of the art and brought the prices down.
There seems to be very little talk about making medical education cheaper and more accessible. Why wouldn't it be cheaper if we had more MDs and nurses? What if we made it easier to become an MD ?
The insurance system is a cartel and they are greedy. However the regulations (upheld by the government) enable it.
We've done that to some extent via the legal enablement of nurse practitioner and physician assistant led care. Of course, largely speaking all they do is supervise the recording of patient metrics and prescribe drugs in label-consistent ways, but that often works out reasonably well for the patient. When the patient needs specialty care then the NP or PA simply punts them into the winds of referrals and insurance justifications.
I'm not sure there's any realistic way to enhance the availability of specialists. You can't 'stub' your way through providing the care of a skilled gastroenterologist by substitution with a NP, though PAs in specialty care are becoming common.
Why not open more medical schools? And eliminate the matching system? If you want to be an ____-ologist, here is the list of requirements. Meet the requirements and you are the ___ologist. Not whether or not a practice group likes you, or your parents knew which colleague to talk to. Don't allow the supply of MDs to be constrained.
The bigger restriction is number of residency positions which has been limited by government funding constraints. Also you need sufficient skilled doctors to train these residents. There is also the issue of physician burnout and preferences of doctors to be specialist vs being in primary care. So what often happens is foreign medical grads apply for these kind of roles. Also foreign medical doctors have a couple of requirements to work in the US. Get their foreign degree reviews to meet requirements, pass the US medical exams and finally they have to redo their residency even if they have significant experience. Some of this is largely controlled at the state level. Some states are considering loosening the residency part to a shorter period for primary care position for foreign doctors that are willing to work in underserved areas. I know California is also reducing restrictions on foreign dentists.
It really is. I’m not a fan of Reagan’s politics, but I respect his point of view.
But the weird deification of him, now displaced by the new guy’s cult of personality is so awful and toxic. He’s either a giant among men or a demon, and both positions are wrong.
I think the weirdness is the recent condemnation of him by the far-left. They are shitting on a guy who has been dead for 20 years. It's absolutely bizarre. It seemed to start about 2020 out of the blue.
But there are plenty of countries with functioning healthcare systems that are private? The Swiss, for instance. Moreover depending on what counts as "government’s gotta run it" (paying for it? administering it? actually providing care?) you can argue that the German or even Canadian systems aren't government run, at least to some degree.
In the Swiss system the private insurance companies are required to be non-profits. The government sets the standard for care and coverage and all the companies can do is compete on price.
Basically what Obamacare was originally intended to be before they had to compromise to get it passed.
They were trying to get Republican votes so that the law would be bipartisan. In the end it passed on a party line vote, so maybe the compromises were a mistake...
The parties weren't yet ideologically sorted. The Democratic majority included dozens of members of the Blue Dog coalition, a conservative group who (among other things) didn't support healthcare reform.
Also the us Congress is blocked by the senate needing 60 votes/supporters to reach cloture on every single bill, except the once per year thing that got the bbb passed. So it's very easy to block the other side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
I've heard good things about the Dutch system of healthcare and that it may be adoptable to the US. I'd totally agree that healthcare corporations become non profit like Kaiser here in the US. They aren't perfect, but they seem to be better than the their for profit competitors.
Dutch system and original Romney care (and early versions of Obama care) had a lot in common. Health care providers are private, insurance companies private, gov dictates a basic list of treatments which count as "basic care" and must be covered by insurance, sets max deductible / copay etc, insurance companies are not allowed to refuse any customers, everyone must have insurance, if you can't afford it gov will pay for your insurance.
Afaik that's the gist of it. The ACA has been maimed on various fronts (e.g. the mandate "everyone must have health insurance" is no longer practically in effect), but it originally started out very similar. Far more than to, e.g., the UK's NHS which is fundamentally quite different.
If you only ever look at the way a system works at a specific point in time you only observe it at that point in time.
America has had multiple attempts at solutions for healthcare over the years, each started with good intent and then waylaid by various causes to produce what we have right now.
A sibling comment mentions political compromise to pass the ACA, as an example of this.
Another example is that HMOs were started with inherent goodness, but got “corrupted” (in my mind) by profit seeking.
To directly answer your question: a core tenet of the Republican tent is minimal government involvement in day to day lives of the citizenry. Ergo, the Swiss system won’t work because it involves a lot of bureaucracy. Republicans link bureaucracy to cost, and feel this is not an appropriate use of tax payers dollars.
The holes in this political doctrine are not part of my answer here fwiw. Please no “but…” comments to that end :)
To be fair the tenet is minimal involvement in the day to day operations of the economy and maximal involvement in the day to day lives of the citizenry.
I do find the ironies in political platforms quite beautiful. I also love how they provides endless fodder for largely fruitless internet discussion ^_^
In speaking with my republican father in law on his opposition to universal healthcare, it dawned on me that he views it as a sort of zero sum game. If he has healthcare today, and then universal healthcare offers it to folks that don't have it today, it is a loss for him.
It’s absolutely the case that public health coverage will benefit some people who make bad health decisions at the cost to some of those who make good decisions (or the decisions themselves must be made by a central authority).
That doesn’t make it the wrong policy decision. Lots of systems we happily manage with similar dynamics. But I don’t think denying that basic fact is the right path forward. The moral hazard is real and worth acknowledging.
Ironically the people who make bad health decisions are often benefiting the medical system by dieing more often around retirement age rather than going on to live 20+ years past retirement with age-related healthcare problems that cost WAY more than any other health conditions they could encounter when they are younger.
Smokers for example have more lung disease and cancer which cost money to treat, but usually not until they are in their 60s so they still spend their entire life paying into the system, but then they die soon after, saving on age related healthcare costs. And that is on top of smoking disqualifying someone from many treatments and surgeries, making smokers a net-win for healthcare costs to society.
Being really fat also seems to have similar effects, although the the finances are much closer so perhaps the second order effects from being fat cancel them out. But on paper they are still a bit cheaper than the average person.
Many people will argue against it because it "feels wrong" and they think unhealthy people should be punished (for example with higher insurance fees) and don't want to admit that unhealthy people are subsidizing their own healthcare, doubly so if you add in the sin taxes they have been paying their whole life that often result in more state income than their entire life-time medical costs add up to. But there has been numerous studies across the decades in Europe and the US showing how much cheaper unhealthy people that die earlier are to care for compared to the 90 year old granny walking everyday and risking broken hips and taking 30 different medications a day.
The problem is we're already doing that, just worse.
Insurance is just risk-pooling. The most effective risk-pooling requires a bigger pool. That's why we have big insurance companies and bigger companies offer better employer healthcare plans.
Well, the biggest pool is the entire US population. So, we should just do that.
We already have socialized medicine. If my coworker smokes, I pay for that. If we're going to do socialized medicine, we should do it right.
This is going to be the ultimate issue if we do achieve some sort of post scarcity world where human labor is redundant. The idea that it’s not someone’s fault their indenture is unnecessary let alone a moral failing deserving of punishment is foreign to a lot of American thinking. The puritanical labor is godly mentality combined with the long term warping of anti Soviet propaganda is going to lead to some serious wide spread suffering that would take what should be the greatest achievement of man kind and turn it into a scourge.
Obamacare was a replica of Romneycare, which was implemented in Massachusetts. It was the republican approach of leveraging private enterprise and encouraging consolidated medical networks.
The difference now is the republicans have changed, and nuanced issues are just not welcome on the platform of a party following a cult of personality.
They were advocating for it before Obama tried to get it done. It was implemented in Massachusetts and termed "Romneycare" as Mitt Romney was the governor. Once Obama tried to implement it, it was government overreach and had to be watered down to get consensus. Personally I think we should have a govt option along side others, but all healthcare should be nonprofit (as in the Swiss model). Profit extraction is antithetical to healthcare.
Because it's any amount of government spending for one. And for two (this one is more of my opinion than the last one) the US has a problem where we, as a culture, view poor people as somehow morally or ethically broken, which is what causes them to be poor. Therefore, we shouldn't spend money that could positively impact them, regardless of its overall benefit. I got mine, so anyone can, but as the cultural zeitgeist.
Almost nobody in US politics who talks about something doesn't understand it or thinks it through. That's for people on the left and and on the right. They just repeat talking points that are given to them by wealthy party donors.
Your first point doesn't mean that universal health care in the US would not be expensive. It definitely would, not that the USG couldn't afford it, but it wouldn't be cheap.
It’s not a matter of acceptance. We can’t accept the cost of anything consistently growing at a rate faster than GDP. That’s just math, not ethics or political choice theory or anything else. Health care cost growth is going to slow one way or the another.
Watch what happens to the GDP if they don’t tackle the health care problem. You think it’s expensive now? Negotiating drug prices isn’t going to solve the problem. Having “health insurance” isn’t going to work when an AI decides whether your illness warrants saving you.
You all need to think about what’s going to happen to you when you can’t move anymore. Will you have enough money? Triple it. Maybe 6x it. Only the rich will be able to live healthy unless you’re diligent about your own health or strike it rich in an IPO.
But growth is also going to slow due to demographics, and this is unavoidable. Are we going to prioritize caring for humans? Or line goes up? Because line goes up is going to hit the demographic wall eventually.
It has more to do with demand than being anything. Demand for healthcare is highly inelastic. If the price of Pokémon’s grew faster than GDP consistently we would be fine. But if the price of a necessity for life does, we will not be fine.
This is why life necessities are often treated as a public responsibility. Health care is one of the few that is treated as a luxury.
Hey now. America is a broad spectrum of people — some of us are heretical and believe governments have a role in everyday life, some of us believe the opposite.
The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use.
Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.
That was definitely its appeal to people who didn't want to pay anything for setup installation tools. But that definitely wasn't our only appeal or even our primary appeal. The WiX Toolset unlocked access to the Windows Installer in ways no other installation build tool does. If you didn't need that power then there were absolutely a lot of sharp edges and "missing features" to make your life easier. But if you had hard installation problems, those sharp edges were sometimes the weapons you needed to solve the problem.
> Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services.
I don't monetize WiX for $5,000/yr. I monetize my team and my decades of experience building software installation packages of all shapes and sizes. With this "WiX Developer Direct" program from FireGiant (my company), you get monthly office hours directly with me to discuss whatever you want, you get SLAs for answers to tickets and guaranteed bug fixes so that your development team is never blocked. You also get an annual code review of your code by us and access to some high-end tools we develop. It is a high-touch offering and my customers dig it.
> I guess that's not enough.
That's not the case at all. The XZ Utils incident showed that Open Source sustainability is a huge problem and I was compelled to try to do something to address it. I don't think the Open Source Maintenance Fee is the only solution for sustainability, but I think it's a pretty good one for projects like mine. The WiX Toolset is the first project to adopt it because I need a real project to help work out all of kinks in the OSMF concept. Everything is working very, very well.
WiX basically lets you directly write the internal data structures used by Windows Installer to run the MSIs. Just in XML instead of some ancient binary database that is used in the MSI files to store things.
So the actual "byzantine incomprehensible mess" (which is indeed the correct description) is the MSI format and Windows Installer, not WiX.
> Our primary goal with the WiX Toolset was to provide access to the full power of the Windows Installer. Given the adoption by extremely large software projects, I think we've done pretty well toward that goal. We're slowly turning our attention to simplifying the toolset to make it easier to use for simpler projects. But that's only been a focus for the last couple of years, so not a lot has come about, yet. But the Files element is a huge upgrade.
There is definitely more we can do to make simpler things simpler. :)
What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How much would you pay for ad-free search? The “golden era” of free search was just setting us up for the plucking.
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.
Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.
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