A strawman is when you take someone else’s argument and you represent it as weaker than it really is. By definition their statement was not a strawman.

It also does not appear to be an implication that OSS is a Mossad backdoor, only that the possibility is present. I presume this is based on the fact that Mossad has done this kind of supply-chain attack before (see the Iranian nuclear program, or the Hezbollah pagers) and that there have been multiple recent controversies about code inserted into OSS packages.

OSS is still the way to go, but we need better governance and best practices in a lot of organizations to make that happen. In fact if the FOSS community would help provide training and certification in this realm, it would help deal with many of these concerns.

I know someone who retired early because our ticketing system changed.