Digital sovereignty is also digital national security, which is really what it’s all about.
One “company” has repeatedly proven itself to be a manipulative monopoly who can’t be trusted with your data.
Let’s say I run a digital payment system and I sell your information, spy on you and had proven myself untrustworthy. How long would it be before I was banned from that industry? Or even jailed? Crooked bankers who loot the bank’s funds are not allowed to work in banking and judges ban hackers from owning computers etc.
But they illegally used their monopoly to destroy competitors and we’ll never know what might have been, if they had been stopped.
More recently they were taking screenshots of their users’ activities on their computers without informing them, or getting consent, and later claimed it was to improve the user experience.
Still, nothing significant has been done about it. A fine is nothing to them. It’s like fining you a minuscule amount for speeding. You’re going to keep speeding.
Can you imagine them taking screenshots of government employees’ computer activities? At home or at the office would be way far over the line. It may have already happened.
It could reveal trade, defense or other national secrets, that could be used to unfairly undermine a new product or just steal it, or much worse in the case of government agencies. Countries are like businesses with secrets and they need to protect themselves, their economy (business and industry), and their citizens.
I think the times changed a long time ago, as far as digital trust goes, but nobody has actively made significant changes, yet.
We openSUSE users, and Linux users in general, trust the distros to not treat us the way other operating systems treat their users.
There’s absolutely changes coming that could destroy global OS/software monopolies. Many of those changes are coming from users making different choices, but the governments have been paying attention, too.
It’s not all cost related either. Much of it is security and trust. But cost plays a role in training users to use a new OS in business and government.
Then this…My friend’s wife wants their dual boot Tumbleweed/Windows machine to boot straight to Windows because she doesn’t like Linux. She mostly uses the browser and can’t name why she doesn’t like it. She could learn so much by just using it, but it is what it is.
I just hope governments don’t start forcing companies to lockdown their source code, restrict their servers, and other crazy things that could affect end users like us who use foreign based Linux distros.