Follow
Let's say they choose Ubuntu or whatever else - the distro has its important place, but it not best for all purposes.
A huge public sector project forking it will result in plenty of lobbying to implement this, then that and feature creep, until it's not really usable for anything.
The minister is also missing the point: we don't depend on anyone in terms of software, we're pretty good in terms of software. It's the hardware that we have huge dependency on.