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The EU Open Source Strategy

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu

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Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#31

Post by sph »

bjackman wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I usually come up negative on my The Year of Linux Desktop comments, that would already be a starting point. Unless EU citzens are able to easily walk into FNAC, Vobis, Cool Blue, MediaMarket, Carrefour, Publico,.... and come out with a laptop or desktop with e.g. SuSE Linux already set up, this will always be a niche thing from nerds assembling their own PCs, or finding their ways into Tuxedo and co. And th…

I do not think I want my public sector running GNU/Linux desktops. There is no distro that meets the security requirements. I don't know if Windows is better, I have heard rumours that it's pretty bad. I know MacOS is MUCH better from a security PoV but I definitely don't want my public sector shelling out to Apple and I don't think it meets the boring IT management requirements anyway (I think big tech has a lot of…

I don’t get your comment. They can make a distro secure enough for government use. It’s not like it’s alien technology only the US have, that you need to buy Apple or Microsoft.

It would certainly be the highest ROI to have a local, open system built (by funding) local enterprises. Who knows, maybe a slice of the private sector might adopt it instead of sending money overseas.

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#32

Post by wolvesechoes »

bjackman wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I usually come up negative on my The Year of Linux Desktop comments, that would already be a starting point. Unless EU citzens are able to easily walk into FNAC, Vobis, Cool Blue, MediaMarket, Carrefour, Publico,.... and come out with a laptop or desktop with e.g. SuSE Linux already set up, this will always be a niche thing from nerds assembling their own PCs, or finding their ways into Tuxedo and co. And th…

I do not think I want my public sector running GNU/Linux desktops. There is no distro that meets the security requirements. I don't know if Windows is better, I have heard rumours that it's pretty bad. I know MacOS is MUCH better from a security PoV but I definitely don't want my public sector shelling out to Apple and I don't think it meets the boring IT management requirements anyway (I think big tech has a lot of…

If actors in the EU are serious (I have my doubts, as so far I see nothing more than riding recent anti-Trump sentiment in a hope to win popularity contest) they cannot rely on volunteer effort and gluing bunch of unrelated FOSS projects.

It is not enough to fund a new distro. EU needs its own OS (may be based on Linux, sure) and it needs to fully control it. Otherwise it will end up like most other FOSS projects, full of personal drama and technical bike-shedding.

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#33

Post by lyu07282 »

To people confused or wondering why it's too little, too late, too incompetent, etc.:

The EU makes a lot more sense when you understand it's a neoliberal institution. Just giving people money to work on open source directly would violate state aid/market disruption rules, they aren't allowed to do that because that could negatively impact the profit of some shareholder somewhere. Member states that want to do that even have to ask permission from the commission if they want to give aid to companies [1].

Everything is like that with the EU, they aren't like China that can just put money whereever to develop or fix strategically, rather the EU can't do anything strategically, or fix anything. It's by design they aren't incompetent, that is what market liberalism is. It's core to what they mean when they say "European values".

[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/state-aid/overview_e...

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#34

Post by omnimus »

esperent wrote: post #19

I wish there was somewhere I could earnestly and intelligently have discussions about EU related tech and tech policy, but HN isn't it. As you can see already in this thread, there's 14 comments besides mine and they are 100% negative, and about 95% low effort/reactionary. Of course there's a lot to criticize and also to appreciate about the EU. But this is supposed to be a forum for intelligent, thoughtful discussio…

It's not only HN. You can see big tech media hate against any effort europe does. Everybody is mocking europe for building 10 years old chip fabs or their measly small unusable clouds or bad startup scene.

It's interesting because not that long ago nobody cared about what europe did in tech. Or more like everybody was fine with the fact that europe imported computers and exported something else. It was like that forever. I am not sure where this is coming from. It almost seems like even these weak efforts might mess up with somebodys business.

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#35

Post by pjmlp »

bjackman wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I usually come up negative on my The Year of Linux Desktop comments, that would already be a starting point. Unless EU citzens are able to easily walk into FNAC, Vobis, Cool Blue, MediaMarket, Carrefour, Publico,.... and come out with a laptop or desktop with e.g. SuSE Linux already set up, this will always be a niche thing from nerds assembling their own PCs, or finding their ways into Tuxedo and co. And th…

I do not think I want my public sector running GNU/Linux desktops. There is no distro that meets the security requirements. I don't know if Windows is better, I have heard rumours that it's pretty bad. I know MacOS is MUCH better from a security PoV but I definitely don't want my public sector shelling out to Apple and I don't think it meets the boring IT management requirements anyway (I think big tech has a lot of…

In what aspect does GNU/Linux not meet EU sovereignty security requirement, but two American companies do?

Other than the elephant in the room that most FOSS projects are anyway sponsored by US companies, that is.

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#36

Post by scihuber »

esperent wrote: post #19

I wish there was somewhere I could earnestly and intelligently have discussions about EU related tech and tech policy, but HN isn't it. As you can see already in this thread, there's 14 comments besides mine and they are 100% negative, and about 95% low effort/reactionary. Of course there's a lot to criticize and also to appreciate about the EU. But this is supposed to be a forum for intelligent, thoughtful discussio…

[dead]

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#37

Post by FpUser »

I think unless they have some alternative to Github (Codeberg yes) but with comparable number of repo's this strategy does not yet look very encouraging. Difference between number of open repos is huge, about 100 times

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#39

Post by zoul »

esperent wrote: post #19

I wish there was somewhere I could earnestly and intelligently have discussions about EU related tech and tech policy, but HN isn't it. As you can see already in this thread, there's 14 comments besides mine and they are 100% negative, and about 95% low effort/reactionary. Of course there's a lot to criticize and also to appreciate about the EU. But this is supposed to be a forum for intelligent, thoughtful discussio…

Mastodon works fairly well for that I think.

Re: The EU Open Source Strategy

#40

Post by ragebol »

sixhobbits wrote: post #8
ragebol wrote: post #3

All great, but I would love EU and (national, local, ...) governments in the EU simply use the open source stuff already available. Often there is an 'you must open source, unless you explain why not' and then there is some faff about why they really need to be buying more stuff from Microsoft (which is more and more cloud stuff and thus under the CLOUD act etc.) Time to get rid of the 'unless' bit.

There is definitely a lot of this happening, e.g. this is a 'collaboration suite for civil servants' that's basically a collection of existing open source projects https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra/ They show all the components they use here https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/docs/category/com... and have set up guides for departments to operate it all on Kubernetes I'm guessing from my own use of N…

All laudable efforts, but I'd love for my Dutch govt to actually use these broadly. With the support behind it to file down those rough edges for the benefit of all.
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