I would be entirely unsurprised if the ones protesting are not rich, and they don’t realize that they won’t be affected.

Let’s have a trigger warning on that, please.

Cries in Brexit

You mean like Ukrainians? When Putin just won the election?

They are going to spend those 4 years doing everything they can to fix the next election as well. Gerrymandering, voter intimidation, you name it. By all means hide in bed to get over the shock but, if you stay there, you’ll need to stay there more than 4 years.

So an EU-backed distro could be the same. Yes, they would fund maintainers, but their own maintainers, not maintainers of upstream distros.

How much of Ubuntu’s funding goes to supporting debian? I actually don’t know.

I don’t, for example, see Ubuntu listed here: https://www.debian.org/partners/

Well, what better way to embrace FOSS than dismissing the efforts of all the existing distro maintainers? Welcome to the community, guys. Good luck building your cathedral next to the bazaar!

How about they instead work together with the distros and create a way of certifying a distro as gov-ready?