Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.
The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.
So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.
Even if upstream linux banned european contributors, there are enough european contributors that a fork would just emerge. So I’m really not too worried about that happening.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
[1] https://www.ein.org.uk/news/home-office-remove-euss-pre-sett...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/0e29224f-9d06-4315-a89f-e334ffbc6...
Also, what nationality do you say Elon Musk is, out of curiosity? Let's test your consistency :)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but we (I live in Spain) have come a long way since 1492 (534 years ago) and if that's the most recent example you can find of "Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders" I think you yourself know that stuff like that doesn't happen today, in Europe.
> Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders
Who'd've thunk it, people be tribal?
Yeah, I won't claim that everyone is treated equally or even fairly in Europe, and some places are absolutely worse than others, in many different ways.
I'd still claim we no longer do "expulsions" of entire ethnoreligious groups anymore in the 21st century though, which was the initial example of why Europe today is terrible.
> Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders
You seemed to be picking a rather narrow slice of the scope.
I'd suggest that in Europe also there's more than just bad thoughts for outsiders but bad words, bad treatment, and exclusion from thriving. Extreme cases include bodily harm and I'm fairly certain death but these extreme occur at a lower scale.
Lieutenant Torvalds on the other hand fulfilled his service duties.
Should the US and South Africa go to war it seems clear where musks loyalties would lie. Should the US and Finland go to war I suspect that Torvalds wouldn’t be as clear cut.
The FT piece is paywalled. But two prominent members of Reform are currently in jail - one for domestic abuse, and one for treason (!) - so the party is not famous for a steely dedication to the moral high ground.
Oh, the terror.
> Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland
> In 2004, Torvalds moved with his family from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon.
...what?
There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.
I think the AI act is a great example here. The EU came up with regulation for an emerging technology that basically killed the chance for Europe to compete. Lots of people disagreed with this criticism when the act was debated, but it turns out the critics were right. Europe will be buying AI services from elsewhere because Europe wasn't able to compete.
This entire way of thinking in Europe would need to reverse for there to be a chance that the brain drain changes course.
On the IT and AI services: Europe hasn't really failed to compete in innovation, as much as scale of operation. That might change if we have a security imperative to protect our own markets for these things against an increasingly hostile US.
That might have changed somewhat, recently.
That is not the situation at the moment.