11 ms·

The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies. Looking at the list of projects you

The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies. Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions. While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft. The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.

Deukhoofd 2y ago
Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon. As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies. The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time. I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere. A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.
  - mvanbaak 2y ago
    And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.
    - wqaatwt 2y ago
      If it’s government owned/controlled it will be much, much worse than Microsoft (purely from the product quality perspective)
      - guappa 2y ago
        Uh? Why? You think that government employees are genetically stupid?
        wqaatwt 2y ago
        Companies that don’t have to compete have no incentives to make good products. Especially when high level government officials (i.e. people controlling their funding) are their clients and jot end consumers. Wasting time/resources to make good products under such circumstances would be quite stupid. Of course same often applies to large enterprise corporation but thankfully at least occasionally they can go bankrupt (which keeps them in line to some extent).
        guappa 2y ago
        Your religious faith in the perfect market is a dangerous cult. I hope you can seek help at some point.
        wqaatwt 2y ago
        What perfect market? What is that even supposed to mean..
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      And?
- 47282847 2y ago
  The current NGI program (“Next Generation Internet“), of which NLNet is a participant of, is part of the Horizon Europe EU level program with a (fixed) runtime from 2021-2027. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Europe
maelito 2y ago
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors Google's Android is the largest OS by usage. But yes, you're right. When you try to use a non-US OS in France you end up buying US hardware and erasing your data on the next LineageOS release. We need vendors.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >Google's Android is the largest OS by usage. I am primarily thinking about government institutions and corporations. There Microsoft is used almost everywhere. Mobile phones are a secondary issue in my opinion, also because Android is already much more open than Windows.
  - Flatterer3544 2y ago
    There's an attempt to move away from Microsoft enterprise tools, e.g. 365+ ecosystem. See opendesk.eu , it's a platform collaborating with many EU open-source developers, and it's funded primarily by the German government.
pickledoyster 2y ago
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft. This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  I think that is a question of architecture. What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
  - mvanbaak 2y ago
    Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful. Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.
    - monade 2y ago
      Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.
    - Guthur 2y ago
      Microsoft has a terrible history of integration even among it's own products and has forced obsoletion throughout. If it's literally you only have a single vendor to pay then you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy. You can't on the one hand maintain the myth that there will somehow be private competition but then on the other set the barriers so high that only the largest most entrenched monopolies can succeed.
pydry 2y ago
The EU could set up something publicly run at first, creating (software) contracts which let chunks of the system get run by small, focused, competitive European businesses who could focus on, say, running a data center in France, providing blob storage services, managed Postgres or whatever...
- constantcrying 2y ago
  But the issue with many small corporations is that you can not run office IT like that. People buy from Microsoft because you can get all in one from them. If you do not compete with that, then you aren't competing at all.
  - pydry 2y ago
    That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together. The EU government can provide that. That would not only compete with Microsoft it could harness the power of small business/startup competition for the individual components which Microsoft can't do. Japanese keiretsu are a good model to follow here. It was a network of small businesses each of whom held shares in related companies, centered around a bank that provided financing. It was responsible for Japan's economic miracle. China also did something quite similar which is why they are absolutely dominant in electronics manufacturing. The EU government doesn't appear willing to do anything like this though. I think they'd rather just get sweet talked by SAP into funneling taxpayer cash into their coffers.
    - fidotron 2y ago
      > That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together. This is legitimately a really good suggestion.
jonathanstrange 2y ago
There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them. Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  I don't think administrative work needs any killer applications. You need a complete system which actually works together and can be sourced by a single vendor.
  - jonathanstrange 2y ago
    You're assuming that people want to switch but I'm talking about the incentives for end consumers to switch. There has to be some strong motivation for switching, and it's not only going to be GUI design. Something about a new OS must be really desirable, either the hardware it's running on or better applications. I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      >You're assuming that people want to switch No, I am not. That is the stance of the EU. Switching is a matter of European security. What "people" want is already irrelevant and whether the GUI is consistent or not couldn't matter less.
b112 2y ago
Microsoft's push to the cloud and subscriptions for core stuff... outlook, word, excel, is so bizarre and filled with hubris. An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers. That's a good step. And a there are vendors supporting Linux. You can be sure such vendors would firm that up with a government sized buy. Linux support is flawless, as long as you select supported components. And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers. No. There is no vendor for this. Such a vendor would need to offer and support everything that MS is offering and supporting. >And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that. Integration is hard. It needs to work together. We all know that Linux has some rough edges (and so does Windows) and the vendor has to take care of it all and actually needs to fix it. A company like that has to suddenly do maintenance on many major open source projects.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    > No. There is no vendor for this. You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem? My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      >You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem? Because there seems to be no alternative.
      - 2y ago
preisschild 2y ago
> While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft. I think that's good. It prevents forming monopolies and makes use of open standards more often.
graemep 2y ago
> The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies. its also very little compared with how much they spend on US suppliers. It also does not address the issue of private sector dependence on the US. > Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace? The complete package. Hardware, software and ecosystem by a single company. Only Microsoft and Google have anything coming close to this.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - graemep 2y ago
    Organisations are unlikely to rely only on Apple Software though. Most organisations do not use MS or Google hardware though. MS can provide everything for a standard office desktop, but the real strength of their OS is the availability of lots of third party software.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sybercecurity 2y ago
      Don't forget enterprise management. Windows makes it easy to maintain a fleet of endpoints much easier than MacOS or Linux.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
cookiengineer 2y ago
Well, you could also decide to pay a linux distribution of your choice. KDE is a German project, GNOME a French/German project, most of Debian's maintainers come from the EU, Manjaro is a German project, probably most Arch, NixOS and Alpine maintainers come from the EU as well... The problem with open source projects is always "unopinionatism". The only project that comes to mind where the design language feels actually integrated are KDE Plasma (not before) and maybe elementaryOS. But those projects need a lot of funding to come to feature parity with Microsoft's and Apple's alternatives. Especially in the enterprise/corporate product portfolio, and system landscape administration.
- monade 2y ago
  KDE Plasma is actually in the list...
  - kps 2y ago
    And I'll be happy to see Dolphin get decent keyboard navigation.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  Again, none of these projects can solve the larger issue. KDE does not do what Microsoft does. You can not give 100M to KDE to have them setup and maintain your government infrastructure.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    If you have 100M I'll create a company to setup and maintain infrastructure. Though depending on your size I might need more money to maintain yours. Setting up the company isn't hard. What is hard is doing it today. It will take a year just to figure out the various custom configurations you need to get a majority of users switched over without issue, and there will be a long tail weird cases that will go on for years before everything is done. This isn't unusual - the simpler case of switching my college campus from Coke to Pepsi took over a month and there both vendors cooperated in making it a smooth switch (Coke does not want to burn bridges as this happens all the time and they want to be back again next time the contract comes up - right now Microsoft doesn't have that incentive)
akudha 2y ago
They gotta start somewhere, no? It is going to be extremely difficult (maybe even close to impossible) to dislodge the incumbents, doesn't mean they shouldn't try
thmsths 2y ago
Sounds like we need a European software agency then. While these projects are technically independent of the EU, Ariane and the A400M are great examples of European collaboration. We need the same for software: create a company/agency/institute, fund them appropriately (the A400M had a development cost of over 20 billions to give a ballpark figure) and ask them to produce an OS, a browser and an office suite. Make sure it's done with a product mindset, that they have ownership of it. Pay market rate for the employees. And within a decade we could have a credible alternative to Apple/Microsoft, then we can mandate the different EU administrations to switch to this software stack. The biggest road block I can foresee is the infighting about how to "fairly" distribute the jobs. My worry is that instead of having a couple of locations that can each focus on a key aspect of the project, we would end up with 27 offices, with all the siloing that it entails. Which is literally one of Ariane's greatest weaknesses...
- dingnuts 2y ago
  I'm sure a centrally planned initiative will beat the market and create a better product for you to use in Europe, just like Lada defeated Ford!
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    Exactly. Just like Airbus can't compete with the likes of Boeing.
    - gunalx 2y ago
      Well. At least airbus dosent drop out of the skies, or loose emergency doors out of the blue.
      - subulaz 2y ago
        constantcrying's comment may be meant with sarcasm because Airbus leads Boeing in market share in addition to having fewer models with explosive decompression issues...
  - 2y ago
freedomben 2y ago
I've long wished Red Hat would open some kind of consumer/business facing market. Fedora is already so damn close, it just needs a little bit more love. Red Hat could partner with Framework, or Lenovo, or Dell for the hardware. Red Hat is already so connected with various stakeholders (Linux Foundation, Gnome, etc) that they wouldn't even have the huge barrier-of-entry of herding all those cats. The EU funding or putting out an RFP or something would be amazing.
- pabs3 2y ago
  The hardware vendors should just offer OS choice at checkout time, and revenue sharing for the resulting choices.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I don't disagree, but without some sort of formal or official support from the distribution, I think this is a tall ask. Some vendors have shipped Ubuntu and Fedora on laptops, but not many. If they were going to truly do this, I think it's reasonable for them to expect a minimum level of support from the parent company behind the operating system. Even just for training and bug purposes, people could easily end up getting an OS they aren't comfortable with and complaining at the laptop vendor for it.
    - pabs3 2y ago
      That is definitely the wrong approach with the Linux ecosystem, and any other open source ecosystem. Not all distros actually have a single parent company, or any parent company, many are volunteer only but accept donations. The right approach would be for the laptop vendor to test their laptops with distros requested by their customers, and to contribute new drivers and fixes to the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream projects, and to require their chip suppliers to do the same. The revenue sharing could be via an official partnership, or conference/etc sponsorship arrangements or even just regular donations. The OS selection would probably have to be hidden behind an "advanced community supported options" area, to reduce the confusion you mention.

Deukhoofd 2y ago

Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon. As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).

constantcrying 2y ago
>As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies. The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time. I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere. A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.
- mvanbaak 2y ago
  And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    If it’s government owned/controlled it will be much, much worse than Microsoft (purely from the product quality perspective)
    - guappa 2y ago
      Uh? Why? You think that government employees are genetically stupid?
      - wqaatwt 2y ago
        Companies that don’t have to compete have no incentives to make good products. Especially when high level government officials (i.e. people controlling their funding) are their clients and jot end consumers. Wasting time/resources to make good products under such circumstances would be quite stupid. Of course same often applies to large enterprise corporation but thankfully at least occasionally they can go bankrupt (which keeps them in line to some extent).
        guappa 2y ago
        Your religious faith in the perfect market is a dangerous cult. I hope you can seek help at some point.
        wqaatwt 2y ago
        What perfect market? What is that even supposed to mean..
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    And?
47282847 2y ago
The current NGI program (“Next Generation Internet“), of which NLNet is a participant of, is part of the Horizon Europe EU level program with a (fixed) runtime from 2021-2027. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Europe

maelito 2y ago

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors Google's Android is the largest OS by usage. But yes, you're right. When you try to use a non-US OS in France you end up buying US hardware and erasing your data on the next LineageOS release. We need vendors.

constantcrying 2y ago
>Google's Android is the largest OS by usage. I am primarily thinking about government institutions and corporations. There Microsoft is used almost everywhere. Mobile phones are a secondary issue in my opinion, also because Android is already much more open than Windows.
- Flatterer3544 2y ago
  There's an attempt to move away from Microsoft enterprise tools, e.g. 365+ ecosystem. See opendesk.eu , it's a platform collaborating with many EU open-source developers, and it's funded primarily by the German government.

pickledoyster 2y ago

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft. This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.

constantcrying 2y ago
I think that is a question of architecture. What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
- mvanbaak 2y ago
  Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful. Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.
  - monade 2y ago
    Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.
  - Guthur 2y ago
    Microsoft has a terrible history of integration even among it's own products and has forced obsoletion throughout. If it's literally you only have a single vendor to pay then you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy. You can't on the one hand maintain the myth that there will somehow be private competition but then on the other set the barriers so high that only the largest most entrenched monopolies can succeed.

pydry 2y ago

The EU could set up something publicly run at first, creating (software) contracts which let chunks of the system get run by small, focused, competitive European businesses who could focus on, say, running a data center in France, providing blob storage services, managed Postgres or whatever...

constantcrying 2y ago
But the issue with many small corporations is that you can not run office IT like that. People buy from Microsoft because you can get all in one from them. If you do not compete with that, then you aren't competing at all.
- pydry 2y ago
  That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together. The EU government can provide that. That would not only compete with Microsoft it could harness the power of small business/startup competition for the individual components which Microsoft can't do. Japanese keiretsu are a good model to follow here. It was a network of small businesses each of whom held shares in related companies, centered around a bank that provided financing. It was responsible for Japan's economic miracle. China also did something quite similar which is why they are absolutely dominant in electronics manufacturing. The EU government doesn't appear willing to do anything like this though. I think they'd rather just get sweet talked by SAP into funneling taxpayer cash into their coffers.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    > That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together. This is legitimately a really good suggestion.

jonathanstrange 2y ago

There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them. Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.

constantcrying 2y ago
I don't think administrative work needs any killer applications. You need a complete system which actually works together and can be sourced by a single vendor.
- jonathanstrange 2y ago
  You're assuming that people want to switch but I'm talking about the incentives for end consumers to switch. There has to be some strong motivation for switching, and it's not only going to be GUI design. Something about a new OS must be really desirable, either the hardware it's running on or better applications. I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    >You're assuming that people want to switch No, I am not. That is the stance of the EU. Switching is a matter of European security. What "people" want is already irrelevant and whether the GUI is consistent or not couldn't matter less.

b112 2y ago

Microsoft's push to the cloud and subscriptions for core stuff... outlook, word, excel, is so bizarre and filled with hubris. An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers. That's a good step. And a there are vendors supporting Linux. You can be sure such vendors would firm that up with a government sized buy. Linux support is flawless, as long as you select supported components. And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.

constantcrying 2y ago
>An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers. No. There is no vendor for this. Such a vendor would need to offer and support everything that MS is offering and supporting. >And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that. Integration is hard. It needs to work together. We all know that Linux has some rough edges (and so does Windows) and the vendor has to take care of it all and actually needs to fix it. A company like that has to suddenly do maintenance on many major open source projects.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > No. There is no vendor for this. You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem? My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    >You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem? Because there seems to be no alternative.
    - 2y ago

preisschild 2y ago

> While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft. I think that's good. It prevents forming monopolies and makes use of open standards more often.

graemep 2y ago

> The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies. its also very little compared with how much they spend on US suppliers. It also does not address the issue of private sector dependence on the US. > Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

constantcrying 2y ago
>What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace? The complete package. Hardware, software and ecosystem by a single company. Only Microsoft and Google have anything coming close to this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- graemep 2y ago
  Organisations are unlikely to rely only on Apple Software though. Most organisations do not use MS or Google hardware though. MS can provide everything for a standard office desktop, but the real strength of their OS is the availability of lots of third party software.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - sybercecurity 2y ago
    Don't forget enterprise management. Windows makes it easy to maintain a fleet of endpoints much easier than MacOS or Linux.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

cookiengineer 2y ago

Well, you could also decide to pay a linux distribution of your choice. KDE is a German project, GNOME a French/German project, most of Debian's maintainers come from the EU, Manjaro is a German project, probably most Arch, NixOS and Alpine maintainers come from the EU as well... The problem with open source projects is always "unopinionatism". The only project that comes to mind where the design language feels actually integrated are KDE Plasma (not before) and maybe elementaryOS. But those projects need a lot of funding to come to feature parity with Microsoft's and Apple's alternatives. Especially in the enterprise/corporate product portfolio, and system landscape administration.

monade 2y ago
KDE Plasma is actually in the list...
- kps 2y ago
  And I'll be happy to see Dolphin get decent keyboard navigation.
constantcrying 2y ago
Again, none of these projects can solve the larger issue. KDE does not do what Microsoft does. You can not give 100M to KDE to have them setup and maintain your government infrastructure.
- bluGill 2y ago
  If you have 100M I'll create a company to setup and maintain infrastructure. Though depending on your size I might need more money to maintain yours. Setting up the company isn't hard. What is hard is doing it today. It will take a year just to figure out the various custom configurations you need to get a majority of users switched over without issue, and there will be a long tail weird cases that will go on for years before everything is done. This isn't unusual - the simpler case of switching my college campus from Coke to Pepsi took over a month and there both vendors cooperated in making it a smooth switch (Coke does not want to burn bridges as this happens all the time and they want to be back again next time the contract comes up - right now Microsoft doesn't have that incentive)

akudha 2y ago

They gotta start somewhere, no? It is going to be extremely difficult (maybe even close to impossible) to dislodge the incumbents, doesn't mean they shouldn't try

thmsths 2y ago

Sounds like we need a European software agency then. While these projects are technically independent of the EU, Ariane and the A400M are great examples of European collaboration. We need the same for software: create a company/agency/institute, fund them appropriately (the A400M had a development cost of over 20 billions to give a ballpark figure) and ask them to produce an OS, a browser and an office suite. Make sure it's done with a product mindset, that they have ownership of it. Pay market rate for the employees. And within a decade we could have a credible alternative to Apple/Microsoft, then we can mandate the different EU administrations to switch to this software stack. The biggest road block I can foresee is the infighting about how to "fairly" distribute the jobs. My worry is that instead of having a couple of locations that can each focus on a key aspect of the project, we would end up with 27 offices, with all the siloing that it entails. Which is literally one of Ariane's greatest weaknesses...

dingnuts 2y ago
I'm sure a centrally planned initiative will beat the market and create a better product for you to use in Europe, just like Lada defeated Ford!
- constantcrying 2y ago
  Exactly. Just like Airbus can't compete with the likes of Boeing.
  - gunalx 2y ago
    Well. At least airbus dosent drop out of the skies, or loose emergency doors out of the blue.
    - subulaz 2y ago
      constantcrying's comment may be meant with sarcasm because Airbus leads Boeing in market share in addition to having fewer models with explosive decompression issues...
- 2y ago

freedomben 2y ago

I've long wished Red Hat would open some kind of consumer/business facing market. Fedora is already so damn close, it just needs a little bit more love. Red Hat could partner with Framework, or Lenovo, or Dell for the hardware. Red Hat is already so connected with various stakeholders (Linux Foundation, Gnome, etc) that they wouldn't even have the huge barrier-of-entry of herding all those cats. The EU funding or putting out an RFP or something would be amazing.

pabs3 2y ago
The hardware vendors should just offer OS choice at checkout time, and revenue sharing for the resulting choices.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I don't disagree, but without some sort of formal or official support from the distribution, I think this is a tall ask. Some vendors have shipped Ubuntu and Fedora on laptops, but not many. If they were going to truly do this, I think it's reasonable for them to expect a minimum level of support from the parent company behind the operating system. Even just for training and bug purposes, people could easily end up getting an OS they aren't comfortable with and complaining at the laptop vendor for it.
  - pabs3 2y ago
    That is definitely the wrong approach with the Linux ecosystem, and any other open source ecosystem. Not all distros actually have a single parent company, or any parent company, many are volunteer only but accept donations. The right approach would be for the laptop vendor to test their laptops with distros requested by their customers, and to contribute new drivers and fixes to the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream projects, and to require their chip suppliers to do the same. The revenue sharing could be via an official partnership, or conference/etc sponsorship arrangements or even just regular donations. The OS selection would probably have to be hidden behind an "advanced community supported options" area, to reduce the confusion you mention.