8 ms·

Digital Minister wants open standards and open source as guiding principle

67 points by donutloop 1y ago

sputr 1y ago
"Open standards & open source" is such a blast from the past. Namely 2010s Pirate Parties.
rkagerer 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250605030827/https://www.heise.de/en/news/Digital-Minister-wants-open-standards-and-open-source-as-guiding-principle-10414632.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250605030827/https://www.heise...
tetris11 1y ago
Europe really does seem to be leading the way with open source gov tech. If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. This really could be the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an ever-present aspect when filling in forms, tables, templates, etc.
- rwyinuse 1y ago
  I really hope this will be successful. Living in Finland, I was surprised to find out that last year our public sector spent over a billion Euros on Microsoft licenses alone, while simultaneously following austerity politics elsewhere, making cuts that badly impact people's lives to save way smaller sums of money. No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.
  - simiones 1y ago
    > No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here. You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS; nor if it were spent on consulting and/or a government IT office. Trade is not a problem in itself. The real concern is that letting Microsoft be the only game in town for business software of this type lets them control prices - that just having some trustworthy alternatives would allow the same services to be obtained for, say, 500M euro instead. The other concern is related to tech dependence - that the government's reliance on MS services allows the US to use a threat of denying access to MS products as a strong-arming tactic in any negotiations. Finally, the concern that a US company - and, implicitly, US security services - has access to potentially highly confidential data is a national security risk, though the impact is hard to measure.
    - pu_pe 1y ago
      > You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The difference is that if you are using tariffs to stimulate local industrial capacity, this can take many years and you might have competitive disadvantages (ie wages, access to supply chains, etc.). If you are replacing software like Windows and Office with open source alternatives and you put the money from the licenses into your local tech sector to develop a support ecosystem, I think this is both achievable and would make your country richer too.
    - akdor1154 1y ago
      > The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS. If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet. If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would. So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
      - ls612 1y ago
        This is just as ignorant of comparative advantage as Liberation Day was.
      - rwyinuse 1y ago
        Yep, what I was thinking weren't just direct cost savings, but the ways how what money would flow to other parts of Finnish economy had it stayed here, instead of going to America. We're in recession, there are way too many fresh IT grads, and even experienced devs are having it hard in this job market. Ultimately this affects every area of our economy, as unemployed people aren't buying houses or spending much on services. Shifting some spending from MS licenses to developing local solutions would almost certainly have a positive impact on our whole economy, even if the solutions weren't any cheaper in the end. It should be also noted that we have a state-funded education system. It seems incredibly dumb to use lots of public money to train programmers, and then have them sit unemployed, while using more public money to buy mediocre software written by other programmers beyond European Union.
- Arainach 1y ago
  >If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. Why do you believe this is so? It's important to remember that many of the dominant enterprise software companies aren't there as the result of a secret conspiracy - it's because they're very good at listening to what their customers want and delivering it. Saying "we want this open" sounds nice, but the sticker shock of paying for development, maintenance, and hosting is the tip of the iceberg. The real problems and expenses are in support and training. Companies like Microsoft excel here - they have dedicated support teams to escalate to empowered to understand the problems of large customers and get them fixed. Paying an engineer to investigate why your USB badge reader doesn't work on Linux on Lenovo laptops on Thursdays is more expensive than a significant number of Windows licenses. Your comment could be pulled directly from Slashdot back when the German Government decided to try SUSE.
- mvdwoord 1y ago
  One can hope... There is some precedent in Germany, esp. in Munich with LiMux. No clue how successful that project now really is though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
  - Tainnor 1y ago
    As it says on that page, the project was discontinued in 2017 - although they did later make another U-turn and committed to open source without, in my understanding, fully going back to LiMux.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Does he know what he is talking about?
- qznc 1y ago
  I don't think so. His previous job was CEO of a EU-wide electronics retailer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger
  - ginko 1y ago
    He also has a PhD in computational physics and had leading positions in major European telecommunications and energy infrastructure companies. What kind of CV would you expect for you to say he knows what he's talking about? Because I'm honestly having a hard time thinking of something. Maybe being exec/CTO at a FAANG? (but then that'd make him appear biased).
    - qznc 1y ago
      In general, he has a strong science and business background which is good for his position. What I don't see is any connection to Open Source specifically. It's not like he was a manager at SuSE in his early career, for example.
      - imp0cat 1y ago
        And that's good, he may prefer Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.
    - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
      .
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger He's not your typical politician (lawyer or otherwise non technical background, no corporate experience). He actually did a Ph. D. in physics and worked as a management consultant at BCG, and ran a few companies. Pretty impressive profile for such a role as far as I can see. We had some encounter with German bureaucracy in our company that is proper face palm material. We're basically being asked to tell the Rentenversicherung (the state pension fund) a lot of stuff they should already know. We're expected to dig out a lot of stuff from our HR records and send it to them by means of some tedious form. By Fax! We'd laugh about it except we are too busy doing all this bullshit work for them because they can't figure out how to operate in this millennium. We have to dig out records for employees that are long gone, go over their monthly statements, etc. How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. And yet they pay some poor soul to take stacks of paper from a fax machine and enter it into god knows what kind of filing system they have to "update their records". Absolutely appallingly stupid. We're also supposed to sign that fax with our company stamp. This is an actual thing in Germany. At least it used to be. It's no longer actually required to have one. But obviously the German bureaucracy is full of dark little corners that haven't updated their processes since the cold war era when faxes were a new thing. I'd recommend a chainsaw approach but considering how Doge escalated in the US, maybe appointing somebody with a clue is maybe the better move. It's not a bad start. But clearly, something drastic needs to happen. Something more than vague intentions and some IT agency is going to chin stroke over this for a few years. Which is the usual German thing. Lot's of waffle, not a lot of action. And it's probably going to take a decade. My recommendation: disconnect all Fax machines. Anyone caught operating one should be forcefully retired/fired immediately. Make no exceptions. Monitor the telephone network for rogue fax usage and eliminate anything and everything still depending on that nonsense. And then tackle company stamps, civil servants copying information manually from paper into a terminal, etc.
v5v3 1y ago
It's shocking that European countries, whose populations have high digital literacy, who have many leading universities, and can attract talent globally to move to europe has failed to challenge US dominance in tech. It's only Trump's America First policies that is pushing EU to react very late.
- ndepoel 1y ago
  Us Europeans have been extremely naive and complacent for the past decades. We've been all too happy to rely on America for our tech and defense needs, and America has been all too happy to provide. There have been plenty of warning signs in the past that this situation is not as self-evident as we'd like to believe and not sustainable in the long term, but so long as things keep churning along we'd rather just ignore the problem instead of proactively tackling it and becoming more self-sufficient. And yes, now that America are showing their true colors with Trump leading the way, finally, finally we are starting to see that maybe this isn't how we should want things to be. It's still going to take a long time for Europe to shake off its dependence on the US tech industry and truly start to challenge it, but hopefully this is a wake-up call that will gradually push things in the right direction.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  How do you attract "top talent" with half the salaries of the US? Being a software developer in Germany was never an especially lucrative career. They can not even get intra European "talent" to do these jobs. Germany is notorious for its low level of digitalization and it's staggering lack in Software competency.
- captainbland 1y ago
  It's money. No one in Europe has been willing to front the vast amounts of investment capital that get put up in the US. We've collectively been freaking out about state finances non-stop since 2008 and imposing various fiscal straight jackets on ourselves (except for where it comes to free money for wealthy pensioners which is apparently an unstoppable force of nature at this point) I think in general it's also the case that in Europe and the UK, technology has been a very upwardly mobile career path with many people who end up with good incomes but no familial network to fall back on and not accumulating any personal wealth or stability until they're already considering retirement. This basically means technologists in Europe are not empowered to be entrepreneurial as bootstrapping is impractical around full time work and the investment often isn't out there.
jansenmac 1y ago
The top six contributors to Open Source globally are American Companies. In the top 10 there are no European companies, 9 are American and 1 is Chinese. https://opensourceindex.io/ https://opensourceindex.io/
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  red hat punching above its weight
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Affric 1y ago
  Then SAP, SUSE, odoo, Canonical, Elastic, Jetbrains appear in the next 10. Europe is not in a strong position in hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel) and that would take a long time to get closer. But it’s fundamentally because the EU has until recently had a very cooperative relationship with the US.
dust42 1y ago
Two weeks ago the same website (heise.de) reported that the german military will use Google cloud services [1]. If there is any place where local cloud and open standards would make sense, then it seems to me the military would be it. I can't really imagine that the US would ever use another country's IT infrastructure to host sensitive information. [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Cloud-10397526.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...
- qznc 1y ago
  Well, the richest country on earth can afford that. Nearly everybody else cannot. China probably does. The EU could if they would manage to collaborate.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    EU countries are domestic competitors to each other economically and culturally, always have been for hundreds of years, hence the constant wars. They're only united politically in the EU when it comes to negotiating international issues. For example, an EU country won't hesitate to torpedo another country's energy, economy or industry plan if they can score political points at home for their voters or to protect their own domestic industry players from the other members. That's also one of the reasons why Switzerland and Norway refused to join the EU. EU is like a marriage between 27 people instead of 2, always at each other's throats but never(until 2020) divorcing. This is not the ideal environment that scales tech companies. That's why there no big tech from Europe.
    - qznc 1y ago
      Having a common enemy might help though.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        Did it help in 2014? Or in 1939? Or with the mass illegal migration issue? Countries are still very much "every man for himself".
ulrischa 1y ago
Germany is not the poster cild when it comes to digitalisation. Schools do not have tablets, public health uses fax, areas with poor Internet speed...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- msgodel 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - lemma_peculiar 1y ago
    while it is true that most apps are now designed around being dopamine traps, there are lots of great applications for tablets in a school context. just think about not carrying around books, wasting paper, taking notes. tablets are impactful if, and only if, pupils don't have garbage apps on them
    - Affric 1y ago
      I am unsure if tablets offer anything better than paper so long as what kids carry is very deliberately kept light.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      [flagged]
- Semaphor 1y ago
  Schools often do. Not sure if I agree with that being good, though.
- cjpearson 1y ago
  Germany certainly has its issues with digitalization, but bringing TikTok into the classroom should not be its top priority.
  - 1y ago
constantcrying 1y ago
I think the principles behind this are very good, nevertheless the ideas here have been around for a long time and the EU and Germany have funded that direction for quite a while. The questions which haven't been answered are: - How do you create a competitor to US companies. You can not expect industry or even governments to switch to a worse alternative, which requires more personal, causes more issue and causes more costs. How do you develop such a competitor, where will it come from? - How do you ensure that these open standards are good. As of right now basically all funding was distributed to small projects, who created their own niche software for some use case. Microsoft or Google are so valuable because they offer everything together creating a cohesive structure and not just a wide array of thrown together software. - Where are the people to create this? A simple comparison of US and German SW dev salaries will tell you how much more valued SW Developers are in the US. Where do the Legions of people to make a project like this happen come from? Where would they even go? Microsoft and Google are great places to work at, but such places do not exist in Germany.
cies 1y ago
We remember Munich. We cheered. We saw nothing coming out of it. China and Russia also made performative efforts to "ditch MSFT". All walked back on their efforts (probably when they got a better deal).
- fsflover 1y ago
  > We remember Munich. We cheered. We saw nothing coming out of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930203
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Garlef 1y ago
No money mentioned? Empty talk.
kkfx 1y ago
Do see NGI Taler (GNU Taler by EU/ECB) and Tourbillon project vs the recent https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to-europes-ecommerce-transformation-with-passkeys-tokenization https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to... It is clear that with digital money the sole way to make people trust them is being open and it's clear that those who reign in moneyland do not want to loose their comfy position.
solarkraft 1y ago
> When asked whether the emerging Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization had already set up a "signal group" for messaging exchange, the head of department replied that the ministry was still "on a wild goose chase" following the US TeleMessage affair. It was still sounding out which infrastructure would be best for this. I wonder where they will land. Since this is a CDU minister coming from a corporation, I would have instinctively have expected him to side with big business and go with the Microsoft stack. Both that he wasn’t a part of the CDU before joining the government and that he seems to understand the principle of digital sovereignty is a very positive sign to me. Because of this I am certain that they are evaluating OpenDesk (https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en) by the German center for digital sovereignty (https://www.zendis.de/ https://www.zendis.de/), which tries combines Collabora Online, OpenXChange, Matrix, XWiki and some smaller tools into a cohesive suite. Them ending up choosing it would be a natural fit sovereignty wise and not unprecedented - the military‘s BWMessenger is already basically a version of Element. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. Being a former CEO, the man will understand how the efficiency and reliability of the IT infrastructure will affect his organization‘s productivity - and I fear those products are definitely behind the top of the line commercial solutions in that regard. That said, Microsoft also keeps fumbling with its products and ministry workers are likely already used to sub optimal processes, so maybe in the name of sovereignty it will be worth it.

67 points by donutloop 1y ago

"Open standards & open source" is such a blast from the past. Namely 2010s Pirate Parties.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250605030827/https://www.heise.de/en/news/Digital-Minister-wants-open-standards-and-open-source-as-guiding-principle-10414632.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250605030827/https://www.heise...

tetris11 1y ago

Europe really does seem to be leading the way with open source gov tech. If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. This really could be the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an ever-present aspect when filling in forms, tables, templates, etc.

rwyinuse 1y ago
I really hope this will be successful. Living in Finland, I was surprised to find out that last year our public sector spent over a billion Euros on Microsoft licenses alone, while simultaneously following austerity politics elsewhere, making cuts that badly impact people's lives to save way smaller sums of money. No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.
- simiones 1y ago
  > No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here. You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS; nor if it were spent on consulting and/or a government IT office. Trade is not a problem in itself. The real concern is that letting Microsoft be the only game in town for business software of this type lets them control prices - that just having some trustworthy alternatives would allow the same services to be obtained for, say, 500M euro instead. The other concern is related to tech dependence - that the government's reliance on MS services allows the US to use a threat of denying access to MS products as a strong-arming tactic in any negotiations. Finally, the concern that a US company - and, implicitly, US security services - has access to potentially highly confidential data is a national security risk, though the impact is hard to measure.
  - pu_pe 1y ago
    > You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The difference is that if you are using tariffs to stimulate local industrial capacity, this can take many years and you might have competitive disadvantages (ie wages, access to supply chains, etc.). If you are replacing software like Windows and Office with open source alternatives and you put the money from the licenses into your local tech sector to develop a support ecosystem, I think this is both achievable and would make your country richer too.
  - akdor1154 1y ago
    > The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS. If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet. If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would. So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
    - ls612 1y ago
      This is just as ignorant of comparative advantage as Liberation Day was.
    - rwyinuse 1y ago
      Yep, what I was thinking weren't just direct cost savings, but the ways how what money would flow to other parts of Finnish economy had it stayed here, instead of going to America. We're in recession, there are way too many fresh IT grads, and even experienced devs are having it hard in this job market. Ultimately this affects every area of our economy, as unemployed people aren't buying houses or spending much on services. Shifting some spending from MS licenses to developing local solutions would almost certainly have a positive impact on our whole economy, even if the solutions weren't any cheaper in the end. It should be also noted that we have a state-funded education system. It seems incredibly dumb to use lots of public money to train programmers, and then have them sit unemployed, while using more public money to buy mediocre software written by other programmers beyond European Union.
Arainach 1y ago
>If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. Why do you believe this is so? It's important to remember that many of the dominant enterprise software companies aren't there as the result of a secret conspiracy - it's because they're very good at listening to what their customers want and delivering it. Saying "we want this open" sounds nice, but the sticker shock of paying for development, maintenance, and hosting is the tip of the iceberg. The real problems and expenses are in support and training. Companies like Microsoft excel here - they have dedicated support teams to escalate to empowered to understand the problems of large customers and get them fixed. Paying an engineer to investigate why your USB badge reader doesn't work on Linux on Lenovo laptops on Thursdays is more expensive than a significant number of Windows licenses. Your comment could be pulled directly from Slashdot back when the German Government decided to try SUSE.
mvdwoord 1y ago
One can hope... There is some precedent in Germany, esp. in Munich with LiMux. No clue how successful that project now really is though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- Tainnor 1y ago
  As it says on that page, the project was discontinued in 2017 - although they did later make another U-turn and committed to open source without, in my understanding, fully going back to LiMux.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Does he know what he is talking about?

qznc 1y ago
I don't think so. His previous job was CEO of a EU-wide electronics retailer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger
- ginko 1y ago
  He also has a PhD in computational physics and had leading positions in major European telecommunications and energy infrastructure companies. What kind of CV would you expect for you to say he knows what he's talking about? Because I'm honestly having a hard time thinking of something. Maybe being exec/CTO at a FAANG? (but then that'd make him appear biased).
  - qznc 1y ago
    In general, he has a strong science and business background which is good for his position. What I don't see is any connection to Open Source specifically. It's not like he was a manager at SuSE in his early career, for example.
    - imp0cat 1y ago
      And that's good, he may prefer Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.
  - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    .
jillesvangurp 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger He's not your typical politician (lawyer or otherwise non technical background, no corporate experience). He actually did a Ph. D. in physics and worked as a management consultant at BCG, and ran a few companies. Pretty impressive profile for such a role as far as I can see. We had some encounter with German bureaucracy in our company that is proper face palm material. We're basically being asked to tell the Rentenversicherung (the state pension fund) a lot of stuff they should already know. We're expected to dig out a lot of stuff from our HR records and send it to them by means of some tedious form. By Fax! We'd laugh about it except we are too busy doing all this bullshit work for them because they can't figure out how to operate in this millennium. We have to dig out records for employees that are long gone, go over their monthly statements, etc. How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. And yet they pay some poor soul to take stacks of paper from a fax machine and enter it into god knows what kind of filing system they have to "update their records". Absolutely appallingly stupid. We're also supposed to sign that fax with our company stamp. This is an actual thing in Germany. At least it used to be. It's no longer actually required to have one. But obviously the German bureaucracy is full of dark little corners that haven't updated their processes since the cold war era when faxes were a new thing. I'd recommend a chainsaw approach but considering how Doge escalated in the US, maybe appointing somebody with a clue is maybe the better move. It's not a bad start. But clearly, something drastic needs to happen. Something more than vague intentions and some IT agency is going to chin stroke over this for a few years. Which is the usual German thing. Lot's of waffle, not a lot of action. And it's probably going to take a decade. My recommendation: disconnect all Fax machines. Anyone caught operating one should be forcefully retired/fired immediately. Make no exceptions. Monitor the telephone network for rogue fax usage and eliminate anything and everything still depending on that nonsense. And then tackle company stamps, civil servants copying information manually from paper into a terminal, etc.

v5v3 1y ago

It's shocking that European countries, whose populations have high digital literacy, who have many leading universities, and can attract talent globally to move to europe has failed to challenge US dominance in tech. It's only Trump's America First policies that is pushing EU to react very late.

ndepoel 1y ago
Us Europeans have been extremely naive and complacent for the past decades. We've been all too happy to rely on America for our tech and defense needs, and America has been all too happy to provide. There have been plenty of warning signs in the past that this situation is not as self-evident as we'd like to believe and not sustainable in the long term, but so long as things keep churning along we'd rather just ignore the problem instead of proactively tackling it and becoming more self-sufficient. And yes, now that America are showing their true colors with Trump leading the way, finally, finally we are starting to see that maybe this isn't how we should want things to be. It's still going to take a long time for Europe to shake off its dependence on the US tech industry and truly start to challenge it, but hopefully this is a wake-up call that will gradually push things in the right direction.
constantcrying 1y ago
How do you attract "top talent" with half the salaries of the US? Being a software developer in Germany was never an especially lucrative career. They can not even get intra European "talent" to do these jobs. Germany is notorious for its low level of digitalization and it's staggering lack in Software competency.
captainbland 1y ago
It's money. No one in Europe has been willing to front the vast amounts of investment capital that get put up in the US. We've collectively been freaking out about state finances non-stop since 2008 and imposing various fiscal straight jackets on ourselves (except for where it comes to free money for wealthy pensioners which is apparently an unstoppable force of nature at this point) I think in general it's also the case that in Europe and the UK, technology has been a very upwardly mobile career path with many people who end up with good incomes but no familial network to fall back on and not accumulating any personal wealth or stability until they're already considering retirement. This basically means technologists in Europe are not empowered to be entrepreneurial as bootstrapping is impractical around full time work and the investment often isn't out there.

jansenmac 1y ago

The top six contributors to Open Source globally are American Companies. In the top 10 there are no European companies, 9 are American and 1 is Chinese. https://opensourceindex.io/ https://opensourceindex.io/

tonyhart7 1y ago
red hat punching above its weight
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Affric 1y ago
Then SAP, SUSE, odoo, Canonical, Elastic, Jetbrains appear in the next 10. Europe is not in a strong position in hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel) and that would take a long time to get closer. But it’s fundamentally because the EU has until recently had a very cooperative relationship with the US.

dust42 1y ago

Two weeks ago the same website (heise.de) reported that the german military will use Google cloud services [1]. If there is any place where local cloud and open standards would make sense, then it seems to me the military would be it. I can't really imagine that the US would ever use another country's IT infrastructure to host sensitive information. [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Cloud-10397526.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...

qznc 1y ago
Well, the richest country on earth can afford that. Nearly everybody else cannot. China probably does. The EU could if they would manage to collaborate.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  EU countries are domestic competitors to each other economically and culturally, always have been for hundreds of years, hence the constant wars. They're only united politically in the EU when it comes to negotiating international issues. For example, an EU country won't hesitate to torpedo another country's energy, economy or industry plan if they can score political points at home for their voters or to protect their own domestic industry players from the other members. That's also one of the reasons why Switzerland and Norway refused to join the EU. EU is like a marriage between 27 people instead of 2, always at each other's throats but never(until 2020) divorcing. This is not the ideal environment that scales tech companies. That's why there no big tech from Europe.
  - qznc 1y ago
    Having a common enemy might help though.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      Did it help in 2014? Or in 1939? Or with the mass illegal migration issue? Countries are still very much "every man for himself".

ulrischa 1y ago

Germany is not the poster cild when it comes to digitalisation. Schools do not have tablets, public health uses fax, areas with poor Internet speed...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
msgodel 1y ago
[flagged]
- lemma_peculiar 1y ago
  while it is true that most apps are now designed around being dopamine traps, there are lots of great applications for tablets in a school context. just think about not carrying around books, wasting paper, taking notes. tablets are impactful if, and only if, pupils don't have garbage apps on them
  - Affric 1y ago
    I am unsure if tablets offer anything better than paper so long as what kids carry is very deliberately kept light.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    [flagged]
Semaphor 1y ago
Schools often do. Not sure if I agree with that being good, though.
cjpearson 1y ago
Germany certainly has its issues with digitalization, but bringing TikTok into the classroom should not be its top priority.
- 1y ago

constantcrying 1y ago

I think the principles behind this are very good, nevertheless the ideas here have been around for a long time and the EU and Germany have funded that direction for quite a while. The questions which haven't been answered are: - How do you create a competitor to US companies. You can not expect industry or even governments to switch to a worse alternative, which requires more personal, causes more issue and causes more costs. How do you develop such a competitor, where will it come from? - How do you ensure that these open standards are good. As of right now basically all funding was distributed to small projects, who created their own niche software for some use case. Microsoft or Google are so valuable because they offer everything together creating a cohesive structure and not just a wide array of thrown together software. - Where are the people to create this? A simple comparison of US and German SW dev salaries will tell you how much more valued SW Developers are in the US. Where do the Legions of people to make a project like this happen come from? Where would they even go? Microsoft and Google are great places to work at, but such places do not exist in Germany.

cies 1y ago

We remember Munich. We cheered. We saw nothing coming out of it. China and Russia also made performative efforts to "ditch MSFT". All walked back on their efforts (probably when they got a better deal).

fsflover 1y ago
> We remember Munich. We cheered. We saw nothing coming out of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930203

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Garlef 1y ago

No money mentioned? Empty talk.

kkfx 1y ago

Do see NGI Taler (GNU Taler by EU/ECB) and Tourbillon project vs the recent https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to-europes-ecommerce-transformation-with-passkeys-tokenization https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to... It is clear that with digital money the sole way to make people trust them is being open and it's clear that those who reign in moneyland do not want to loose their comfy position.

solarkraft 1y ago

> When asked whether the emerging Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization had already set up a "signal group" for messaging exchange, the head of department replied that the ministry was still "on a wild goose chase" following the US TeleMessage affair. It was still sounding out which infrastructure would be best for this. I wonder where they will land. Since this is a CDU minister coming from a corporation, I would have instinctively have expected him to side with big business and go with the Microsoft stack. Both that he wasn’t a part of the CDU before joining the government and that he seems to understand the principle of digital sovereignty is a very positive sign to me. Because of this I am certain that they are evaluating OpenDesk (https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en) by the German center for digital sovereignty (https://www.zendis.de/ https://www.zendis.de/), which tries combines Collabora Online, OpenXChange, Matrix, XWiki and some smaller tools into a cohesive suite. Them ending up choosing it would be a natural fit sovereignty wise and not unprecedented - the military‘s BWMessenger is already basically a version of Element. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. Being a former CEO, the man will understand how the efficiency and reliability of the IT infrastructure will affect his organization‘s productivity - and I fear those products are definitely behind the top of the line commercial solutions in that regard. That said, Microsoft also keeps fumbling with its products and ministry workers are likely already used to sub optimal processes, so maybe in the name of sovereignty it will be worth it.