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Congress Passes Bill Forcing Tech Companies To Disclose Foreign Software Probes (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Congress is sending President Donald Trump legislation that would force technology companies to disclose if they allowed countries like China and Russia to examine the inner workings of software sold to the U.S. military. Companies would be required to address any security risks posed by the foreign source code reviews to the satisfaction of the Pentagon, or lose the contract. The legislation also creates a database, searchable by other government agencies, of which software was examined by foreign states that the Pentagon considers a cyber security risk. It makes the database available to public records requests, an unusual step for a system likely to include proprietary company secrets. The final version of the bill was approved by the Senate in a 87-10 vote on Wednesday after passing the House last week. The spending bill is expected to be signed into law by Trump.
So how might this affect the companies like RedHat, Debian and the other Linux distros that are open source based?
In all the DoD work I've been exposed to, open source was prohibited altogether. So no Redhat at all, but a 20 year old unpatched Solaris 7 OS was okay.