More and more, governments are deciding to make the switch to open-source software, usually citing or implying privacy concerns over Microsoft Windows, since Microsoft is a US company.

It is a great idea for governments to promote the use of open-source software, but I am not so sure about creating their own distribution of Linux. Internally within a government organization, it makes perfect sense to use a custom distribution, just to make managing everything easier. When you expand this to the entire government or, worse, the entire country, the logic starts to go away.

The only real reason to create a custom Linux distribution just for your own, or your country’s, use, is if all the users have very specific needs. Once you expand beyond a single department of the government, this becomes less and less true. Surely an entire country does not all have the same needs.

Also, from a user’s perspective, would you use an operating system your government handed you at home? It would be like letting them tape a camera to your head, because they claim they will not use the pictures.

Promoting open-source is great, but trying to create customized variants of distributions for too broad of an audience makes little sense.

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