[informatimago]

A country could enforce openess of the source code for imported software and firmware.

- If Toyota (or any car manufacturer) wants to import cars into my country, then they better show us the sources of their firmware and software (and let us re-compile it and re-install it, to make sure it corresponds to the embedded code). And let the papers compare the code quality of Toyota vs. BMW.

- If Microsoft (or any software vendor) wants to import software into my country, then they better show us the sources of their systems and applications (and let us re-compile it and re-install it, to make sure it corresponds to the binary code, and doesn't contain backdoors to the NSA (or the MSI, or the MI5 or whatever).

- and so on.

And actually, citizens can do the same at their level, not letting enter their house any device or software whose code is not open source or even libre software (so they can recompile it and reinstall it on their hardware).

But a country has more weight than a few citizen that would be qualified of lunatics, and has more resources to analyse and validate the software and firmware.

[mjmahone17]

This is essentially what Alexandria used to do: any ship coming to port with any books on board was required to give the library at Alexandria those books for as long as it took for their scribes to copy them. The library then gave the ship owners the copied version (because hey, data is data, what does it matter if you have the original or secondhand copy?)

This helped propel a lot of the world's best ancient thinkers, including Euclid, Archimedes and Eratosthenes.

[phaer]

> And actually, citizens can do the same at their level, not letting enter their house any device or software whose code is not open source or even libre software (so they can recompile it and reinstall it on their hardware).

I tried that, but at the moment it means you can't even own a cellphone, etc

[JonFish85]

Or a new stove, microwave, alarm clock, gas meter, coffee-maker, smart thermostat, ... Limiting yourself to only open-source SW (nevermind HW) is severely crippling, I'd imagine!