Comment by mfuzzey
1 day ago
I think we're going to be seeing more and more of this type of thing in Europe. Of course some administrations have already done it before, sometimes sucessfully, like the French gendarmerie and sometimes unsuccesfully like Munich that ended up reverting to Windows (mostly for political rather than technical reasons).
But previously the motivations were difficult to understand for many, either being about saving money on licenses with dubious returns once retraining was considered or about software freedom arguments that are difficult to explain to non geeks.
These days the US is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy partner / supplier in Europe and the digital digital sovereignty arguments are well understood, both by politicians and the general public.
This is just the result of shifting from the uni-polar world to the multi-polar world. Guess this is just one phenomenon of the poles shifting.
Hope this will result in gain for FOSS and the community.
Even though I tend to bash a bit the whole evolution of Linux Desktop, that is more a complaint of where I wish things to be, than being a naysayer.
FOSS stacks seem the only way with current geopolitics, but there is a big but.
For proper freedom it would only work out if we got back the whole infrastructure from hardware, software, compiler toolchains, everything like in the cold war days, throughout the 8 and 16 bit home computers as well, however I doubt we would go back that far.
I think migrating away from office is not realistic for many companies. They run on Excel, and just breaking one vital table because it uses a macro can cost much more money than the entire office suite for many users over years. The Munich story was doomed to fail. (Of course there are lots of things that work, the open source mail or Zoom or Slack replacements are totally fine in my opinion.)
Most FOSS organisations, including the Linux Foundation, are headquartered in the US and are supported by American companies and, most likely, American three letter agencies.
Yes, but they work differently. Due to their decentralised nature there is not one switch they can turn to shut off their services or programmes. US companies can be ordered to stop their services for certain organisations, individuals or states
Sure, but then some may not remember how usage of the cryptographic algorithms was limited by the US government, including in Open Source software, all the way until late 90s in Central/East Europe.
See how well it works for countries that were cutted out of Github, where most FOSS projects are hosted nowadays, without copies anywhere else, as if Git wasn't any different from Subversion.
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