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An anonymous coward writes "Former cypherpunk shares his conspiratorial view on Linux security:
Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:
"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)
This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. In other words, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military and, as a result, they have significant pull in its development. In that respect, the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.
Next, the FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report is well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end). To me, this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:40AM
Since when does being the largest user/customer equate in having control over it?
(And BTW, when posting directly to a story, it would be nice to have the story shown above the comment edit box)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Kira on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:46AM
Agreed - it's one hell of a leap to go from "the military is (or was in 2003) the largest Red Hat customer" to "the intelligence community is secretly pulling the strings on Linux."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by crutchy on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:48AM
since always
money talks
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Eunuchswear on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:12AM
More to the point, if the US Army is going to run on Linux since when is it in their interest to have Linux be easily crackable by their enemies.
Can we have some paranoia about TOR being written by US Naval Intelligence please.
Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by pteros on Friday February 21 2014, @04:01PM
Because knowing the vulnerabilities beforehand gives you the competitive edge over adversaries and you might want to have it rather than having a level-playing field.
For US, with by epic margin the largest military budget, this seems logical.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Thursday February 20 2014, @02:54PM
Since when does being the largest user/customer equate in having control over it?
The missing number is how much of a percentage of RedHat's business is the DoD?
They could be something like 5% and still be the single largest customer as long as none of the other customers are individually more than 4.99%.
(Score: 2, Informative) by SMI on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:30PM
"Since when does being the largest user/customer equate in having control over it?"
Not saying that this is the case here, but I've heard [nybooks.com] more than once [nea.org] that the state of Texas, for example, is the nations largest buyer of K-12 school textbooks. As such, they hold a lot of sway when it comes to determining what goes into those textbooks and what stays out, not just for the state of Texas, but for the entire nation.
A quick search for Texas schoolbooks yields further examples.