The problem lies in direction and methods.

Direction: toward greater wealth consolidation.

Methods: fear, lies, fostering ignorance, fostering political disinterest, truth embargo, surveillance, overclassification, embezzlement and other white collar crimes unpunished, eliminating the commons, paywalling all things, etc.

Both of those are huge problems that create unlivable societies.

The only proper direction is toward a legally mandated wealth ceiling plus a wealth floor plus enforced and publicly measured and publicly tested market competition to regulate maximum allowed wealth consolidation.

And of course truth has to be the informational currency. And rights. And privacy for the small players, with heavy oversight for the large players because large is dangerous.

We can’t lose the big picture here. Of course the governments must govern, but toward what ends and with what methods matters hugely.

Can’t the MIC just use any existing Linux distro?

I am trying to understand what the injury here is?

Is it mostly about reputational damage from association? Kinda like why are we eating the same food as MIC and at the same table? Is there an injury here beyond this that I am not seeing?

Couldn’t the MIC shut down every FOSS project by declaring they love them and use them? I hope no FOSS dev is so simpleminded as to knee jerk like that.

We have to accept living in a dirty world with dirty people, to some extent. People we don’t like will use our favorite projects sometimes. That’s par for the course.

Where I would draw the line is implemeting some change into the distro that is either only or primarily useful for nefarious purposes, and is largely useless to 99% of normal/ethical use cases. Now THAT would be a real problem, and a real red line, imo.