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.
> 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.
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.
> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you.
This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.
Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
> Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
Dear god no. That's how you end up with contracts assigned to "Joe's Nephew Software Design" that don't just smell but reek of nepotism (although I will admit, the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better), neverending GDPR et al. compliance issues, and massive employee overhead in training and onboarding costs when every local government does its own shit and economies of scale can't be leveraged.
Also, even assuming "Joe's Nephew Software Design" manages to complete the DMV software on time and in budget... who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates? It's (way) easier and cheaper to do continuous maintenance when there are lots of clients to fund upkeep, compared to just one.
> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
>, isn't that surely the problem? Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything
The alternative of modular components with interoperable interfaces means more multiple vendors "finger pointing" at each other with the blame game instead of problems getting resolved. Yes, modular components can theoretically combine "best-of-breed" software ... but the extra complexity of interfaces integration is not worth the tradeoffs for many CIOs.
>Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
It goes both ways. A lot of USA companies depend on a big German software company (SAP AG) for their global ERP system. This includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and most of Fortune 500 companies, etc. They all use SAP for consolidated accounting & finance. Google used to use Oracle (USA) but switched to SAP. SAP is an example of a "integrated system" instead of interfacing a bunch of disparate software silos from various vendors ("accounting software vendor", "demand forecasting software vendor", etc)
Nokia and the rest of the Symbian ecosystem actually led the market by a long stretch, just a short while ago. If they hadn't hired a former Microsoft exec to lead the company, and perhaps with a bit of luck, Nokia/Siemens/etc would have been that alternative. But that is another discussion.
I 100% disagree, and that's as someone who was both a fan of Nokia and even of Windows Phone.
And even if I agreed, they did hire that former MS exec. So they wouldn't have been that alternative, because in no universe would Apple or Google put Stephen Elop in charge of iPhone/Android, and in this universe, Nokia would.
I think there could be a big market for a hosting+support provider that manages the patchwork of open source business applications. Once that's set up, the organization could spend money on the development of the systems they're hosting.
I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.
Isn't that essentially just any existing systems integrator? There's plenty of those that are non-American.
That aside, governments have the resources to do this themselves, that's how they currently do so. Extending those services to local organisations would be a step in the right direction.
The thing about services and tooling is that for many orgs, there's not a whole lot you need, and once you're at a scale where you need tooling to manage that scale, you presumably have the resources for an operations team to deal with that, and can outsource the bits you can't do.
The org I work for outsources our public-facing website work to a web-design co, because that's their speciality, and not ours.
All of that is to say; I agree with you, but I think they already exist in the form of SIs.
I'm halfway there with Communick. I started with the focus on providing hosting for social media and messaging platforms, so I had to find my way around setting up LDAP for SSO, provisioning of object storage for separate services, etc.
But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).
On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.
Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases.
If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.
This doesn’t seem right. What is Microsoft supplying? Windows which is used almost exclusively to access some web service CRUD form. All of these services are made by third party vendors. Any number of OSes could do that from linux based or ChromeOS or MacOS… probably even iOS. There are some legacy win desktop apps that are slowly getting replaced or they are run in VMs.
The Microsoft servers are most likely azure running linux. Thats quite possible to replace by any number of vendors.
The main MOAT microsoft has are the contacts and the lobby. There always is some politician around fighting for Microsoft because they like Outlook more than Thunderbird.
It’s also reason why i think they will keep their dominant position. Even though the idea they provide something rare is increasingly more untrue.
The end user devices are Windows 11, we use M365, but government services are mostly homegrown and the infrastructure runs on Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (Openshift) software.
Replacing Windows 11 with some kind of Linux and M365 by an MTA is technically feasible, there is political momentum building against US-centric services, but here in Europe politicians are historically highly suspicious of technicians, so nothing gets done yet.
It's a rich country, COTS replaced a lot of technical excellence, but the trend can be reversed as we have bright engineers on the inside still.
In poorer countries and regions, the engineering excellence is way better and they are much more independent.
I'm also working on a government institute, but unlike you, we're absolutely owned by Microsoft. Disruptions to that relationship could be existential threats, which is why (slow) movement has started on detaching from them.
Yes. If you want your vendors to interop with each other in any way, it's the same n^2 lines of communication problem you have in dev teams. In fact, it's worse, because the vendors are antagonistic towards each other - it's in their interests that you ditch some of the others and give more of your business to them.
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.
No organisation of any size buys everything from one vendor though. Microsoft dominates desktops, but Apple and Google dominate mobile devices, an organisation might have Oracle databases running on Linux servers on top of that, some SaaS suppliers, some desktop software suppliers....
But still - think how much more you'd need to buy and validate it all works together. Microsoft gives you AD, which works with Outlook, Sharepoint, Azure, Office365, Teams, then all of those, plus Excel, Word, Powerpoint all bundled, and not for very much money.
True, but it varies depending on how well those fit your organisation's needs whether buying into the full bundle is what you want to do. The less of it you want, the less the advantage.
Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.
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.
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).
>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.
If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.
Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.
Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.
> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress
Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.
True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.
But of course it depends on how you define “free market competition” (markets are very rarely even close to being free without significant regulation). Entities which end up “winning” almost inevitably do their utmost to restrict any competition which leads to stagnation.
I dunno if that many Nobel prizes are being awarded to people working for private companies.
But yes, you're right, a government monopoly where there isn't a natural monopoly isn't a good plan. Funding a whole bunch of small projects might be quite a good plan, though. Sort of like angel investment.
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.
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.
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.
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
> An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.
What are the equivalents of Active Directory and the likes of Group Policy? I've seen some compatible/similar tools (like FreeIPA), but they don't seem very popular.
Edit: that’s not a gotcha question or something, I’m genuinely curious about the experiences of people who’ve done deployments like that. I also remember trying to setup Samba to allow some Windows PCs to access storage shares on a Linux box and nothing wanted to work with no obvious error messages. Oh and I have no love for the likes of Kerberos either.
There are no equivalents that encompass the technologies and ease of deployment and management for on-prem.
Samba works just fine as a file server. I'm sure there's some intuitive GUI out there (like Synology's) that makes it easy to set up as a file server only. Not sure about a DC.
But even Microsoft wants you to move to Azure AD + InTune. Arguably more secure and flexible.
>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.
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.
It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.
That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances)
is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with
the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a
surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.
I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of
assumptions that the world is moving beyond.
Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us
tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity
is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why
care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate
functional utility.
In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.
50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many
of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one
computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any
reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of
that failure.
I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no
alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the
point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.
Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."
Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.
[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.
I'm not sure I agree with Adobe design suite being needed. I am a close to someone who's been through multiple different public sector institutions in my country and the only true constants is the cord Microsoft Office suite (Word+Excel+PowerPoint), Outlook and more recently Adobe Acrobat (mostly because of digital signing) and Microsoft Teams.
The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.
LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.
Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features.
Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).
Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.
There are actually quite some projects named in the article that are moving in on Adobe turf:
- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941)
- PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media
- and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS
And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...
So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.
The issue with the Adobe suites is that their alternatives need to be workflow-identical, it's not just how good or bug compatible the competitor needs to be.
The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.
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.
I would claim that many people would be fine using something else because they use 30% of the features of the respective applications.
They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!
As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.
They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.
However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.
Oh well, that was a misunderstanding. If people are forced to use a new OS whether they want it or not, then of course any Linux distro will do and there is hardly any need for a new OS, let alone one that the EU has developed.
I was assuming, in the context of the original post, that the EU lacks in innovation with regards to operating systems and tried to explain why it is hard to innovate in this area because of the application barrier and due to the fact that viable alternatives like Linux aren't competitive enough.
This! Software is stuck in some illusory ideal from the dotcom days, a
global market of meritous choice. It's long been political and about
sovereignty, control and security. Some comments above sing the
praises of Adobe as a "no alternative" software. So, remember that
time when Trump passed an executive order banning Adobe in South
American countries [0]?
The US does not get to use access to tech as a weapon, so they're not
good enough by wider criteria in a changing political world. It
doesn't matter how good are products by Google, Microsoft, Apple,
Adobe, Meta...
I also happen to think they're technically inferior to a diverse
inter-compatible and free ecosystem, but that's becoming a side show.
In a way its good that there are no European vendors. The coming
change cannot be mistaken for trade preference. People are being
"forced to be free" of dangerous influence [1].
I see no mention of the core projects which have been maintained and being used for decades. xz, libexpat, openzfs, NetworkManager and way too many tiny projects which glue the entire linux system. That's how you start to reclaim the open internet. Where is pihole, who is trying to debloat the web? Where is dnsmasq, which is most widely used dns server?
The sovereign tech fund is doing precisely that: Funding critical infrastructure projects. NLnet is also helping in the effort as far as i'm aware, as are some other organizations. Even some companies are chipping in. There is of course always a lot left to do.
From the looks of it, it doesn't seem enough. EU just doesn't have enough money to make this all viable. US is the only country with enough funding resources for quite a lot of critical and over-looked projects
Also: who is working to usurp the free web and bloat it further. Examples being: DoH, cert-pinning, VMs inside apps (TikTok) and those advertising ID things that Google and Mozilla pushed.
Motis (transit calculator), Clearance (OSM contribution analysis) and StreetComplete (OSM contribution gamified) : very important assets for the free mapping community. Good news !
Seems like a well-specified and specific reason for the funding though, not just "do whatever you want":
> This project will develop QA modules for Wiktionary, leading to easy parsing and processing of cross-linguistic data. This helps to unify data formats across Wiktionary, and improve the overall reliability of this invaluable resource.
Given that the EU has 24 official languages, I think it makes a lot of sense to try to contribute resources for improving cross-linguistic data, bonus points for funneling those resources to a relatively open platform.
In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.
I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.
Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.
Actually, the grant process at NLnet is supposed super light weight. It consists of a single short form (https://nlnet.nl/propose) with very little boilerplate. No consultants needed...
Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.
My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.
That is very true. Budget is something that most organisations are fairly bad at. So it does make a lot of sense for e.g. the European Commission to work with organisations like NLnet that do get it.
The application process is pretty easy. I applied a couple of years ago. I did take it seriously, but I probably should have put more time and effort into my message and presentation.
What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.
Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.
> I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
I agree that systems are far from perfect at the time.
I also think that governments have been putting money into digital tech for much less time than private enterprise.
In the US it's 40%. The 10% difference is explained by the US having limited to no public healthcare or pensions. Those are largely paid for privately, which pretty much balances it out.
SSH Stamp looks very interesting at a glance, but there is no information about a project page or a developer. A search for it with DuckDuckGo does not find any information beyond that page. I wonder if this is real. If there is anything open source about this, it is nothing like the open source projects I know.
I'm guessing there isn't anything yet besides the proposal. Since the project start is this month. Knowing NLnet, I think there should be something soon enough.
Originally, NLNet was *private money* given by the founders of a dutch ISP¨.
Now that this private money run out, they made a partnership with the European Commission, which is *public money* and comes with more strings attached.
That all sounds like it's meant to sound sinister, but why? Private individuals sometimes fund great initiatives, as do public organisations. What's your concern?
Both have their ups and downs, but broadly speaking, private money tends to be a lot more flexible and risk-liberal, whereas public money can be like having the worst aspects of the ignorant absentee CEOs-golf-buddy manager and the micromanaging hands-on desperate-to-prove-himself CEOs-nephew manager.
Public money is eventually traced back to some elected official who has absolutely nothing to do with technology but is also very emotionally-invested in showing to the constituents that the money isn't being wasted - to the point where spending the money on something useless but concrete ("ergonomic" coffee mugs) might be deemed preferable to a long-term investment that falls on the wrong side of a term-limit.
Again, public money can be fine and completely no-strings sometimes (and, conversely, private charitable contributions can sometimes end up with plenty of strings too), but there's certainly reasons to point out the differences.
Risk appetite, accountability and support. These go against open source. Gone are the days when businesses were desperate for some software that just works. During my days at apache, I have seen large businesses officially allowing their devs to contribute to opensource full time. IBM being a large contributor. Now people can only accept managed software and hardware. Even if it opensource, it should be managed. Cloud providers offer a lot of opensource as managed services. That sells. No more wild-west.
Something I came across yesterday was OpenCloud. I think with many of these small projects being funded it's not clear there's a cohesive vision of how to reclaim the internet. I mean the browser itself is owned by big tech. I don't know whether you have to start again at the protocol level.
Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.
I previously received funding from nlnet and they have been great to work with. I highly recommend working with them, and they have been supporting amazing projects!
One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.
The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.
Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).
Money down the toilet. Job #1 is to make a google replacement. Job #2, a domestic phone manufacturer (with its own plaftorm / appstore). These are the two primary portals to "The Internet". Without meaningful replacements, they're still on Uncle Sam's plantation. China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.
They are so far behind. Focus! Spitballing 42 random projects is a luxury Europe does not have.
If you are talking about the MNT reform, that is utterly fatuous. Same with f-droid. These are toys for IT fanboys--nothing that will significantly dislodge Europeans from the US tech teat. Europe needs iOS & Google-tier replacements ASAP. China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba. Even Russia has Yandex & Telegram. Europe has zilch.
I figured that after we were caught bugging Merkel's telephone, Europe would have at least gotten started, but I figured wrong.
We can agree to disagree on what is meaningful. Especially F-Droid is already widely used, and I would certainly not call it a toy.
You shouldn't rule out the snowball effect of FOSS. The nice thing about this kind of open program is that someone like you that has a beef and a clue can actually propose something, and get a grant to get the party started. After that, communities can kick in.
> China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.
Ok, that's great and I'm happy for them, how does that help us in Europe though? No matter how decoupled other countries are, doesn't make it less important for others to also eventually get there.
China got there by banning Google. I don't think Europe is willing or able to do that unless Trump antagonism continues for years. Practically noone who has a choice (people in Singapore and Taiwan) between them uses Baidu
I'm currently working on integrating multi-participants video-conferencing in the Movim platform using the NLNet funding system https://nlnet.nl/project/Movim-E2EE-video/
Its super easy to apply and the people are super nice to work with. Also try to find a company that would be interested to implement those kind of features for 5-50K€, they'll laugh at you.
For a tiny bit of "public funding" you get many exciting features on many different open-source projects and initiatives that millions of users are using daily.$
Also NLNet is an independant non-profit organization. No "lazy-european-bureaucrats" there.
> Wikipedia: The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.
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.
> 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?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you.
This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.
Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
> Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
Dear god no. That's how you end up with contracts assigned to "Joe's Nephew Software Design" that don't just smell but reek of nepotism (although I will admit, the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better), neverending GDPR et al. compliance issues, and massive employee overhead in training and onboarding costs when every local government does its own shit and economies of scale can't be leveraged.
Also, even assuming "Joe's Nephew Software Design" manages to complete the DMV software on time and in budget... who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates? It's (way) easier and cheaper to do continuous maintenance when there are lots of clients to fund upkeep, compared to just one.
> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
>, isn't that surely the problem? Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything
For many companies, the idea of having the proverbial "One Throat To Choke" is actually a feature not a bug. (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22one+throat+to+choke%22)
The alternative of modular components with interoperable interfaces means more multiple vendors "finger pointing" at each other with the blame game instead of problems getting resolved. Yes, modular components can theoretically combine "best-of-breed" software ... but the extra complexity of interfaces integration is not worth the tradeoffs for many CIOs.
>Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
It goes both ways. A lot of USA companies depend on a big German software company (SAP AG) for their global ERP system. This includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and most of Fortune 500 companies, etc. They all use SAP for consolidated accounting & finance. Google used to use Oracle (USA) but switched to SAP. SAP is an example of a "integrated system" instead of interfacing a bunch of disparate software silos from various vendors ("accounting software vendor", "demand forecasting software vendor", etc)
> Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.
Nokia and the rest of the Symbian ecosystem actually led the market by a long stretch, just a short while ago. If they hadn't hired a former Microsoft exec to lead the company, and perhaps with a bit of luck, Nokia/Siemens/etc would have been that alternative. But that is another discussion.
I 100% disagree, and that's as someone who was both a fan of Nokia and even of Windows Phone.
And even if I agreed, they did hire that former MS exec. So they wouldn't have been that alternative, because in no universe would Apple or Google put Stephen Elop in charge of iPhone/Android, and in this universe, Nokia would.
I agree, and I'm not sure whether the reason it hasn't happened is that they can't do it, or they won't do it.
I think there could be a big market for a hosting+support provider that manages the patchwork of open source business applications. Once that's set up, the organization could spend money on the development of the systems they're hosting.
I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.
Isn't that essentially just any existing systems integrator? There's plenty of those that are non-American.
That aside, governments have the resources to do this themselves, that's how they currently do so. Extending those services to local organisations would be a step in the right direction.
The thing about services and tooling is that for many orgs, there's not a whole lot you need, and once you're at a scale where you need tooling to manage that scale, you presumably have the resources for an operations team to deal with that, and can outsource the bits you can't do.
The org I work for outsources our public-facing website work to a web-design co, because that's their speciality, and not ours.
All of that is to say; I agree with you, but I think they already exist in the form of SIs.
I'm halfway there with Communick. I started with the focus on providing hosting for social media and messaging platforms, so I had to find my way around setting up LDAP for SSO, provisioning of object storage for separate services, etc.
But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).
On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.
I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.
Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases.
If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.
This doesn’t seem right. What is Microsoft supplying? Windows which is used almost exclusively to access some web service CRUD form. All of these services are made by third party vendors. Any number of OSes could do that from linux based or ChromeOS or MacOS… probably even iOS. There are some legacy win desktop apps that are slowly getting replaced or they are run in VMs.
The Microsoft servers are most likely azure running linux. Thats quite possible to replace by any number of vendors.
The main MOAT microsoft has are the contacts and the lobby. There always is some politician around fighting for Microsoft because they like Outlook more than Thunderbird.
It’s also reason why i think they will keep their dominant position. Even though the idea they provide something rare is increasingly more untrue.
Not really.
The end user devices are Windows 11, we use M365, but government services are mostly homegrown and the infrastructure runs on Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (Openshift) software.
Replacing Windows 11 with some kind of Linux and M365 by an MTA is technically feasible, there is political momentum building against US-centric services, but here in Europe politicians are historically highly suspicious of technicians, so nothing gets done yet.
It's a rich country, COTS replaced a lot of technical excellence, but the trend can be reversed as we have bright engineers on the inside still.
In poorer countries and regions, the engineering excellence is way better and they are much more independent.
I'm also working on a government institute, but unlike you, we're absolutely owned by Microsoft. Disruptions to that relationship could be existential threats, which is why (slow) movement has started on detaching from them.
RedHat and SuSe do compete there.
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.
Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?
There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?
Yes. If you want your vendors to interop with each other in any way, it's the same n^2 lines of communication problem you have in dev teams. In fact, it's worse, because the vendors are antagonistic towards each other - it's in their interests that you ditch some of the others and give more of your business to them.
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.
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.
No organisation of any size buys everything from one vendor though. Microsoft dominates desktops, but Apple and Google dominate mobile devices, an organisation might have Oracle databases running on Linux servers on top of that, some SaaS suppliers, some desktop software suppliers....
But still - think how much more you'd need to buy and validate it all works together. Microsoft gives you AD, which works with Outlook, Sharepoint, Azure, Office365, Teams, then all of those, plus Excel, Word, Powerpoint all bundled, and not for very much money.
True, but it varies depending on how well those fit your organisation's needs whether buying into the full bundle is what you want to do. The less of it you want, the less the advantage.
Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.
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.
> you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy
Er, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?
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).
>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.
And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.
If it’s government owned/controlled it will be much, much worse than Microsoft (purely from the product quality perspective)
And?
> A new system vendor needs to be created
If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.
Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.
Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.
> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress
Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.
True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.
> most progress
Well most progress in computing, software and related areas did come from private companies.
> True free market competition creates monopolies and
That’s where regulation must come in. To stop monopolies from forming or at least from abusing their position.
Anyway your suggestion is to jump straight to the monopoly phase?
> Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress.
Source: "100 things that never happened"
Or the majority of human history..
But of course it depends on how you define “free market competition” (markets are very rarely even close to being free without significant regulation). Entities which end up “winning” almost inevitably do their utmost to restrict any competition which leads to stagnation.
I dunno if that many Nobel prizes are being awarded to people working for private companies.
But yes, you're right, a government monopoly where there isn't a natural monopoly isn't a good plan. Funding a whole bunch of small projects might be quite a good plan, though. Sort of like angel investment.
I don’t know if that many Nobel prizes were rewarded to any anyone working on software or even computing in general.
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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
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.
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.
KDE Plasma is actually in the list...
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
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
> An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.
What are the equivalents of Active Directory and the likes of Group Policy? I've seen some compatible/similar tools (like FreeIPA), but they don't seem very popular.
Edit: that’s not a gotcha question or something, I’m genuinely curious about the experiences of people who’ve done deployments like that. I also remember trying to setup Samba to allow some Windows PCs to access storage shares on a Linux box and nothing wanted to work with no obvious error messages. Oh and I have no love for the likes of Kerberos either.
I haven't done it, but Ansible would be the equivalent to group policies, no? The learning curve is very different though.
You can use Samba and Kerberos for identity management. But again, very different to use.
There are no equivalents that encompass the technologies and ease of deployment and management for on-prem.
Samba works just fine as a file server. I'm sure there's some intuitive GUI out there (like Synology's) that makes it easy to set up as a file server only. Not sure about a DC.
But even Microsoft wants you to move to Azure AD + InTune. Arguably more secure and flexible.
>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.
> 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.
It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.
Just ask for their certification? Almost every distro that's big enough to need an org to maintain it, has a professional certification program.
>> hundreds of companies, but which are good?
most of them, since there is a lot of competition. Competition is good for businesses.
>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.
> seems to be no alternative
That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.
I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.
Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.
In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.
50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.
I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
I don't particularly care.
This is not a nice to have. It is about European security.
I think we agree. But security is also very much about examining assumptions.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.
Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."
Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.
[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.
I'm not sure I agree with Adobe design suite being needed. I am a close to someone who's been through multiple different public sector institutions in my country and the only true constants is the cord Microsoft Office suite (Word+Excel+PowerPoint), Outlook and more recently Adobe Acrobat (mostly because of digital signing) and Microsoft Teams.
The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.
LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.
Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features. Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).
Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.
There are actually quite some projects named in the article that are moving in on Adobe turf:
- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941) - PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media - and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS
And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...
So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.
The issue with the Adobe suites is that their alternatives need to be workflow-identical, it's not just how good or bug compatible the competitor needs to be.
The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.
> but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Ah photoshop. Every municipality employee uses photoshop at least 5h a day!
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.
I would claim that many people would be fine using something else because they use 30% of the features of the respective applications.
They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!
As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.
They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.
However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.
>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.
Oh well, that was a misunderstanding. If people are forced to use a new OS whether they want it or not, then of course any Linux distro will do and there is hardly any need for a new OS, let alone one that the EU has developed.
I was assuming, in the context of the original post, that the EU lacks in innovation with regards to operating systems and tried to explain why it is hard to innovate in this area because of the application barrier and due to the fact that viable alternatives like Linux aren't competitive enough.
> What "people" want is already irrelevant
This! Software is stuck in some illusory ideal from the dotcom days, a global market of meritous choice. It's long been political and about sovereignty, control and security. Some comments above sing the praises of Adobe as a "no alternative" software. So, remember that time when Trump passed an executive order banning Adobe in South American countries [0]?
The US does not get to use access to tech as a weapon, so they're not good enough by wider criteria in a changing political world. It doesn't matter how good are products by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta...
I also happen to think they're technically inferior to a diverse inter-compatible and free ecosystem, but that's becoming a side show.
In a way its good that there are no European vendors. The coming change cannot be mistaken for trade preference. People are being "forced to be free" of dangerous influence [1].
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49973337
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/
I see no mention of the core projects which have been maintained and being used for decades. xz, libexpat, openzfs, NetworkManager and way too many tiny projects which glue the entire linux system. That's how you start to reclaim the open internet. Where is pihole, who is trying to debloat the web? Where is dnsmasq, which is most widely used dns server?
They did provide funding to dnsmasq: https://nlnet.nl/bluehatsprize/2024/1.html
And DNSvizor: https://nlnet.nl/project/DNSvizor
The sovereign tech fund is doing precisely that: Funding critical infrastructure projects. NLnet is also helping in the effort as far as i'm aware, as are some other organizations. Even some companies are chipping in. There is of course always a lot left to do.
From the looks of it, it doesn't seem enough. EU just doesn't have enough money to make this all viable. US is the only country with enough funding resources for quite a lot of critical and over-looked projects
Also: who is working to usurp the free web and bloat it further. Examples being: DoH, cert-pinning, VMs inside apps (TikTok) and those advertising ID things that Google and Mozilla pushed.
Motis (transit calculator), Clearance (OSM contribution analysis) and StreetComplete (OSM contribution gamified) : very important assets for the free mapping community. Good news !
Some great initiatives being funded, especially: >PeerTube for Institutions — Make PeerTube easier to manage and moderate at scale
I'd LOVE to see more institutions and NGOs move to PeerTube.
The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary, part of the well funded Wikimedia that spends over a quarter of its budget on "Building analytics and ML services" https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
> The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary
Seems like a well-specified and specific reason for the funding though, not just "do whatever you want":
> This project will develop QA modules for Wiktionary, leading to easy parsing and processing of cross-linguistic data. This helps to unify data formats across Wiktionary, and improve the overall reliability of this invaluable resource.
Given that the EU has 24 official languages, I think it makes a lot of sense to try to contribute resources for improving cross-linguistic data, bonus points for funneling those resources to a relatively open platform.
There is also a lot of indirect funding in the form of the governments purchasing habits: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-s...
In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.
I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.
Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.
Actually, the grant process at NLnet is supposed super light weight. It consists of a single short form (https://nlnet.nl/propose) with very little boilerplate. No consultants needed...
Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.
My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.
That is very true. Budget is something that most organisations are fairly bad at. So it does make a lot of sense for e.g. the European Commission to work with organisations like NLnet that do get it.
The application process is pretty easy. I applied a couple of years ago. I did take it seriously, but I probably should have put more time and effort into my message and presentation.
What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.
Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.
> I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
I agree that systems are far from perfect at the time. I also think that governments have been putting money into digital tech for much less time than private enterprise.
Regarding the money that gets to the developers, I added a comment on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770310
Except for the fact that big consultancies who receive most of the government contracts, have zero contribution to the open source ecosystem.
When you pay 1000 USD to Microsoft to use o365, how much of that goes to the developers?
The argument of "but very little of that money will go to *actual* development" is not looking at the alternative being used now.
>>In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP.
That's a terrifying statistic. It doesn't sound very sustainable.
In the US it's 40%. The 10% difference is explained by the US having limited to no public healthcare or pensions. Those are largely paid for privately, which pretty much balances it out.
https://nlnet.nl/project/SSH-Stamp/
SSH Stamp looks very interesting at a glance, but there is no information about a project page or a developer. A search for it with DuckDuckGo does not find any information beyond that page. I wonder if this is real. If there is anything open source about this, it is nothing like the open source projects I know.
I'm guessing there isn't anything yet besides the proposal. Since the project start is this month. Knowing NLnet, I think there should be something soon enough.
NLnet is a great initiative. Among the numerous projects they have supported is Marginalia [1] search engine.
1. https://www.marginalia.nu/
"NLnet is a great initiative"
Originally, NLNet was *private money* given by the founders of a dutch ISP¨.
Now that this private money run out, they made a partnership with the European Commission, which is *public money* and comes with more strings attached.
That all sounds like it's meant to sound sinister, but why? Private individuals sometimes fund great initiatives, as do public organisations. What's your concern?
Both have their ups and downs, but broadly speaking, private money tends to be a lot more flexible and risk-liberal, whereas public money can be like having the worst aspects of the ignorant absentee CEOs-golf-buddy manager and the micromanaging hands-on desperate-to-prove-himself CEOs-nephew manager.
Public money is eventually traced back to some elected official who has absolutely nothing to do with technology but is also very emotionally-invested in showing to the constituents that the money isn't being wasted - to the point where spending the money on something useless but concrete ("ergonomic" coffee mugs) might be deemed preferable to a long-term investment that falls on the wrong side of a term-limit.
Again, public money can be fine and completely no-strings sometimes (and, conversely, private charitable contributions can sometimes end up with plenty of strings too), but there's certainly reasons to point out the differences.
Mastodon is another one (ActivityPub / Feediverse)
https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon/
Risk appetite, accountability and support. These go against open source. Gone are the days when businesses were desperate for some software that just works. During my days at apache, I have seen large businesses officially allowing their devs to contribute to opensource full time. IBM being a large contributor. Now people can only accept managed software and hardware. Even if it opensource, it should be managed. Cloud providers offer a lot of opensource as managed services. That sells. No more wild-west.
Something I came across yesterday was OpenCloud. I think with many of these small projects being funded it's not clear there's a cohesive vision of how to reclaim the internet. I mean the browser itself is owned by big tech. I don't know whether you have to start again at the protocol level.
https://opencloud.eu/en
Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.
I previously received funding from nlnet and they have been great to work with. I highly recommend working with them, and they have been supporting amazing projects!
One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.
The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.
Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).
Money down the toilet. Job #1 is to make a google replacement. Job #2, a domestic phone manufacturer (with its own plaftorm / appstore). These are the two primary portals to "The Internet". Without meaningful replacements, they're still on Uncle Sam's plantation. China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.
They are so far behind. Focus! Spitballing 42 random projects is a luxury Europe does not have.
You didn't spot the open hardware tablet in there? There was another announcement made almost simultaneously about funding for a.o. F-Droid:
https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20250421-project-selection-pilots...
There are many search projects you can find like marginalia.nu and Searx, just not in this call round.
If you are talking about the MNT reform, that is utterly fatuous. Same with f-droid. These are toys for IT fanboys--nothing that will significantly dislodge Europeans from the US tech teat. Europe needs iOS & Google-tier replacements ASAP. China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba. Even Russia has Yandex & Telegram. Europe has zilch.
I figured that after we were caught bugging Merkel's telephone, Europe would have at least gotten started, but I figured wrong.
We can agree to disagree on what is meaningful. Especially F-Droid is already widely used, and I would certainly not call it a toy.
You shouldn't rule out the snowball effect of FOSS. The nice thing about this kind of open program is that someone like you that has a beef and a clue can actually propose something, and get a grant to get the party started. After that, communities can kick in.
> China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.
Ok, that's great and I'm happy for them, how does that help us in Europe though? No matter how decoupled other countries are, doesn't make it less important for others to also eventually get there.
China got there by banning Google. I don't think Europe is willing or able to do that unless Trump antagonism continues for years. Practically noone who has a choice (people in Singapore and Taiwan) between them uses Baidu
They applied in October 2024 and starting receiving funding (€ 50.000 max) in May 2025. This is beyond ridicoulness.
This is beyond ridiculousness.
An AI agent could make a far better job than many well-paid but extremely lazy european bureaurats.
Let alone the corruption, if they choose their friend projects.
I'm pro an unite Europe but current European Union is beyond shame.
What is your issue there ?
I'm currently working on integrating multi-participants video-conferencing in the Movim platform using the NLNet funding system https://nlnet.nl/project/Movim-E2EE-video/
Its super easy to apply and the people are super nice to work with. Also try to find a company that would be interested to implement those kind of features for 5-50K€, they'll laugh at you.
For a tiny bit of "public funding" you get many exciting features on many different open-source projects and initiatives that millions of users are using daily.$
Also NLNet is an independant non-profit organization. No "lazy-european-bureaucrats" there.
> Wikipedia: The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.