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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Motivation plays a role here. I'm not defending in any means what the US, Israel and many other countries have done or are doing to others, but today, as we are writing, Russia is probably more motivated to harm western businesses by hitting common people than the US or Israel or any other country, except maybe China to a much lesser extent.

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In terms of motivation - I think it's more likely that Russia is more motivated to be independent of American controlled software.

Open source == a level of independence from sanctions and foreign government spying.

How are they hurting western businesses by releasing OSS? We already have LibreOffice. What is the point of your comment?

Sure, they are OSS but how do you know what goes into their binaries? Being open source does not imply that the binaries are not backdoored.

Wouldn't it be relatively trivial for someone to compile, compare checksums and call them out?

It's more likely they'd introduce a security flaw that is hard to detect in the OSS code. If someone finds, they'd just claim it was a security incident which is now fixed (and then they'd move to another masked flaw).

> Wouldn't it be relatively trivial for someone to compile, compare checksums and call them out?

Generally not. Most software does not have reproducible builds, so the checksums would be unlikely to match.

> Sure, they are OSS but how do you know what goes into their binaries? Being open source does not imply that the binaries are not backdoored.

Then build your own binaries. I'm sure the Russian government wouldn't struggle to do this.

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