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My personal favorite outcome of this would be a joint public and corporate funded leap in open source development. This would do much for the budget, privacy an
by lgreiv 4y ago
My personal favorite outcome of this would be a joint public and corporate funded leap in open source development. This would do much for the budget, privacy and probably also security of businesses and private users. A good example where this principle is already in use is the Matrix protocol.
- Arathorn 4y agoGetting the balance of this right to prevent a tragedy of the commons turns out to be hard. Element (who funds most of Matrix dev) has released almost everything we do as permissive-licensed FOSS open source. As a result, there's a huge ecosystem of folks building commercial solutions on Matrix. But surprisingly little $ actually gets back to Element (or the Matrix Foundation) from those commercial solutions, if any.
- jokowueu 4y agoI don't have any proof but I'm certain Germany must have made some sort of funding for matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthcare-system-adopts-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthc...
- yorwba 4y ago> TI-Messenger is gematik’s technical specification for an interoperable secure instant messaging standard. The healthcare industry will be able to build a wide range of apps based on TI-Messenger specifications knowing that, being built on Matrix, all those apps will interoperate. The ones getting most of the money will probably be third-party developers integrating Matrix into their gematik-certified healthcare products.
- Arathorn 4y agoIronically very little of the $ seems to be propagating back to Matrix itself…
- oger 4y agoThe messengerfor German armed forces is based on matrix https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundeswehr-setzt-kuenftig-auf-Matrix-als-Messenger-4719474.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundeswehr-setzt-kue...
- nradov 4y agoIt's disappointing that Germany decided to go their own way rather than joining DirectTrust and working on the Trusted Instant Messaging Plus open industry standard. It's specifically designed for healthcare. https://directtrust.org/standards/tim-plus https://directtrust.org/standards/tim-plus
- RobotToaster 4y agoWhich somewhat highlights the problem with "permissive" licences, as opposed to copyleft ones like AGPL.
- LadyCailin 4y agoBut would AGPL have gotten traction in the first place? I guess we can’t say for sure, but my guess is no. I think it safe to say that at minimum it would be an additional barrier to entry.
- sschueller 4y agoMastodon and peertube are both AGPL
- LadyCailin 4y agoI’d say the jury is still out on Mastadon (and anyways would not be competitive except for Twitter imploding), and I haven’t even heard of the other one, so I’m not sure this is a compelling argument.
- Arathorn 4y agothe problem of AGPL for Matrix is that it would have likely impeded uptake significantly. But yes, it’s something we’ve considered.
- lgreiv 4y agoAgreed. Ideally, the official policy should be introduced to either fund or contribute to FOSS used.
- account42 4y agoPerhaps its actually good that one company can't capture significant ammounts of money when the goal should be to move away from single-company communication tools. Of course the Foundation does need funding and I think it would be in Germany's / the EU's interest to secure that.
- kevinmchugh 4y agoHow does FOSS make gdpr compliance easier?
- ceejayoz 4y agoYou can host it yourself on servers in the EU.
- kenjackson 4y agoBut Office supports this too. This isn’t an FOSS advantage. It’s a disadvantage of cloud hosted providers.
- kevinmchugh 4y agoSo self-hostable or on-prem software has the advantage, not specifically FOSS. But in many cases this transfers the gdpr compliance burden to the business that's running the software
- someweirdperson 4y agoThe burden is on the owner of the data in any case. When using an external data processor like Microsoft they have to make sure that the external company complies, and this must be explicitly covered by the contract.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoBut most companies don't actually want to host things themselves. If they did, 'cloud computing' wouldn't be so popular.
- ceejayoz 4y agoSure, but smaller EU-resident providers could do hosting for companies.
- playingalong 4y agoNot in a direct way. What they mean is that FOSS is more likely to be developed with product quality and value in mind. Proprietary software need to satisfy corporate goals too. And these are often contradictory to the spirit behind GDPR.
- angio 4y agoMore likely, someone will figure out a corporate structure that makes the EU subsidiaries out of reach from the US government. It's obvious that eventually all US-based services will be declared in breach of the GDPR given the US stance on global surveillance.
- luckylion 4y agoAm I mistaken, or did MS have that with Deutsche Telekom running a special Azure zone on their behalf? The idea was that MS wouldn't be able to comply with US court orders because they weren't in control of that zone, and DT's German subsidiary running that operation wouldn't be in US jurisdiction. As far as I know, they shut it down two years ago citing higher costs and operational issues.
- LadyCailin 4y agoI don’t know about that, but that’s how it works in China, at least. 21vianet is the operator for the Chinese Azure cloud, and presumably is fully accountable to Chinese law, not American.
- oytis 4y agoAFAIK Nextcloud does have some funding from the EU. I've got an instance for file storage and notes, but more advanced stuff is pretty buggy and unstable in my experience
- TheCapeGreek 4y agoI have had broadly the same use case - small scale file sync (text notes, some documents) If you want to save some cash, I can recommend Syncthing. You don't need to host a server for it unless you want to - it is peer-to-peer with all devices you want to be linked via their discovery servers (you can host your own as well). I used to host my own Nextcloud for about 3 years, moved to Syncthing a few weeks ago, pretty happy so far.
- oytis 4y agoThank you, I'll try it. I don't spend any money on my Nextcloud though, it's hosted on an "always free" (true so far) compute instance of Oracle OCI.
- john61 4y agoThere is already some work in progress to replace Office 365 with an free software stack for governments: https://www.phoenix-werkstatt.de https://www.phoenix-werkstatt.de
- black_puppydog 4y agoAyayay, the list of partners does not really inspire confidence that this will be the fast success we'd need: https://www.phoenix-werkstatt.de/#c2669 https://www.phoenix-werkstatt.de/#c2669
- willnonya 4y agoThis is a pipe dream not based in reality. Open source isn't all upside with no down and that is why co.mercial software still dominates and will unless someone decides to take the hit and carry the load for those downsides. Besides, in terms of MS365 there is the added problem that there is no good alternative. There are some reasonable alternatives for individual instances but not for the delivers of using 365.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- _8j50 4y agoForget the migration costs just to develop and standup the cost and infra would be a few billion euros just for one O365 app. I don't think people understand how much O365 apps are used. Nobody is filing github issues either with this, you need to do commercial and customer support, basically replace a core MS SaaS product but not with some shitty idealistic hack because the economic consequences are dire!
- usrbinbash 4y agoInvestments in that area would be investment into European open source development as a whole and European IT in general. Businesses can spring up around such efforts, people can find employment, technology can be developed, and the European market could be strengthened.
- brookst 4y agoAre business allowed to use M365 if all of this open source investment fails to produce an equal-or-better solution? Or are businesses forced to operate with the result even if it’s terrible?
- still_grokking 4y agoWhere is it allowed to do illegal things because you don't like the legal alternative (or there isn't even one)?
- lgreiv 4y agoI’ll take the strawman. Of course, the software would not be forced upon businesses. Commercial solutions that protect people’s data properly should be perfectly fine to use. I’d even expect many proprietary solutions to come up that solve niche use cases or provide a more polished UX/UI.
- n8cpdx 4y agoWhy haven’t Europeans been able to be successful in this area already? It’s not like there aren’t always European businesses working on this problem. It is striking that both the evil empire solution (Microsoft 365) and the underdog disruptive upstart (Google Docs, at least that’s what it was ~15 years ago) are both American companies. iWork is American, Zoho is Indian. Why aren’t Europeans producing competitive software?
- hda111 4y agoKolab was originally an open source alternative to Exchange developed by BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) and different companies. I don’t think it has been very successful though.
- dehrmann 4y agoOpenOffice has been good enough for a while, but we're still here. I'm not sure what's missing for governments to adopt it, but the solution isn't just "more open source development." Something else is wrong.
- willnonya 4y agoWho host it for the organization? Who supports it when something goes wrong? Who ensures there are a wide base of users trained to use it? How good are the transition resources? How much will it really cost to transition to the "free" option...