I agree with others here that focusing your eyes on _using_ open source is, at least, an incomplete view of the problem.
What we (European software engineers) have been arguing, is that software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak. Thinking that open source software will help solve your budget and/or political problem is not something we're interested in doing for free. This excerpt here:
> In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has
suggests they see it as free candy, rather than the result of love and hard work, provided for free because it's nice. Pay for what you use, especially at the government level.
Of course, I strongly encourage the European governments to invest in open source. And if you're interested in giving money, I'm interested in doing work. Same as ever.
While I agree with the sentiment I'm not sure this is actually viable.
For example here in Poland the previous govt invested in huge amount of software for digital govt services. From company formation, social insurance/heathcare (things like electronic prescriptions and patient data) to tax submission at all levels.
All of this is implemented using publicly documented open standards so anyone can write a client for these services, or anyone can use official Web clients, but none of the code is open source.
This is in contrast to previous governments that tried to implement all of this using proprietary standards where the companies hired were paid billions to deliver a system and they ended up owning the data exchange protocol and a client they distributed in binary only form. And they also profited from commercial software that implemented their proprietary protocols.
That worked (for the company hired)for taxes and they made billions. But for other stuff like medical, when they had no way to sell their proprietary standards they wasted billions and years of time and delivered nothing. Then subsequent govt threw the entire project out and built it on open standards.
So based on this experience I think using well documented open data exchange standards is much more important than software itself being open source.
Who cares the server side software is open source if you still can't submit your taxes with your own python script?
> … public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed
That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.” I do understand the potential for misinterpretation, but one could easily add “after paying for it” and those freedoms don’t change.
Many projects made with government money are developed under the EUPL. Including some of the ones I've worked on. Oddly enough, they aren't available for download anywhere.
Just to second what you are saying, over 2025 we saw some cases where small open source projects that underpin massive infrastructure are struggling for funding, and they don't even need that much! To me this is a place where the EU can spend a few dollars and have a massive influence on the sustainability and direction of open source projects.
European software industry is so interesting because my impression is that the (Western) OSS sector is largely supported by talented European developers. Just a vibe from interacting with hundreds of successful OSS projects.
Europe clearly has endemic talent, and I'm not even sure it's a funding problem rather than an organizational/leadership one. They could throw money at developers who already have decent if humble QoL, or they could bring them together to build large systems that can compete with American big tech.
I wonder if this is useful feedback to give? It would probably need to be more actionable. I’m hopeful the European open source community will take this invitation seriously.
> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions
I think that might be the wrong approach, at least in this day and age. The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue. It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.
Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue
Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.
>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
> It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.
When it is funded publicly it certainly is. A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame. If something is going to be commercially valuable then people should develop it in the private sphere. Nothing stopping them. In fact, that is basically what the US does and it has been wildly successful and relegated the EU to being a technical backwater trying to figure out how to get out from under the US's commercial dominance.
> Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yes. Knowledge is for everyone. Even the Americans. Trying to hold back the progress of the entire species because the US knows how to pump out software is a remarkably myopic strategy.
Those were mantras of the Free Software movement. The open source movement (despite creating a lot of free software) was never about the moral stance of software freedom, but the practical benefits
The EU definitely has no concept of "love". It was founded to make trade easier. All the fuzz about humane values and morals has been tacked on more or less recently, to keep up the support for it from the population. It is the literal wolf in sheep's clothing.
It was founded to make world war 3 impossible /through/ trade. By intertwining the economies of countries that considered each other hereditary enemies (Erbfeinde in German), it sought to make war too costly to consider. Humanitarian values are a core part of what became the EU.
That's one of the reasons the EU has had so many political problems with Hungary and Poland in the last decade: their drift to authoritarian forms of government (including weakening the judiciary in Poland) didn't impact trade at all. Nonetheless, it went against the humanitarian values.
I'm no EU fanboy (there's plenty to criticize), but regarding chat control and surveillance, it's important to see from which part of the EU institutions the push comes: the council. The council consists of the governments of the member states. It's not the big bad EU trying to force surveillance on the innocent countries; it's the governments trying to push domestically unpopular surveillance through the EU. The directly elected EU parliament has so far always prevented this push.
Subsidiarity has been a key building block of the EU and has failed the EU for unexpected reasons. Subsidiarity was pursued for accountability and to make the EU less centralized - decisions should be made at the lowest, most local level possible, with central authorities only stepping in when a task cannot be effectively handled locally.
However, it means that here in Sweden govt bodies are all individually moving to Azure, because each one makes that local decision in their best interest. The same thing has happened all over the EU - and very few govt bodies would ever take the risk of investing in using EU cloud or data platforms. We need public procurement to help kickstart life into the Eurostack.
The EU has Schleswig-Holstein (a German state) as an example; office software and email replaced by open source alternatives. Look overthere, I would say. But overthere is a politician who actually understands what he is talking about.
I don't feel the need to provide governments/politicians with open source software who think like this: "open source – which is a public good to be freely used".
Start understanding how this works, because your American and Chinese counterparts do a better job at this.
By the way, don't come lazily asking for input. Go out proactively and find the answers yourself.
> By the way, don't come lazily asking for input. Go out proactively and find the answers yourself.
The EU very regularly asks for input on new policy initiatives, it's one of the better aspects of the legislative/policy-making process. They are asking citizens' opinions on a policy that will potentially affect them, if you tell them to f off and do it themselves then don't be surprised when you hate the policy that comes out of it.
I don't tell them to F off, I give them my citizen opinion on HN. I expect their policy to be in their best interest, and I stopped hating on that a long time ago.
> The EU very regularly asks for input on new policy initiatives, it's one of the better aspects of the legislative/policy-making process.
And then it basically ignores all the input and moves forward with policies like chat control that are widely unpopular anyway. So much for consulting the people and asking for feedback.
A long time ago Amazon tried to acquire a good online business diapers.com and initially the owners refused.
Amazon proceded to get investors or lenders to funds 200 million dollars to undercut sales of diapers.com. Fast forward they were close to bankruptcy and owners were forced to sell it off for a bargain to Amazon. Since then the price of diapers have risen to be very profitable.
The point being that any businesses that sell proprietary software will do the same to kill competition, but in the long run they will end up costing more.
The real issue is government spending is that procurement is very broken even if you would opt for buying support for open source
Software. This is not a problem China nor North Korea have due to how corporations have no easy way to influence politics in those Authoritarian countries.
It’d be a shame if MS was compelled by the current US administration to shutdown EU users of CoPilot/365/whatever. Whole agencies within governments lose all of their data and can barely function.
A move to alternatives is an imperative! I hope it works for them and stimulates their tech sector.
As a Linux guy for many a year, I've often said that going all-in on Microsoft tech stacks is like painting yourself into a corner. It all looks like it's going fine until you decide that you want to leave the room.
It'd be a shame if an asteroid struck earth tomorrow as well.
But given limited resources, we tend not to devote a ton of resources to every possible tail risk since there's millions of them.
Europe should focus on building domestic tech capacity for other reasons (our own future prosperity being one), but being worried about Microsoft Word access over some silly news headlines is not one of them.
Every single productivity suite can open/modify word docs and powerpoints and excel formats. This is not a huge issue.
The US doesnt recognize many of the bodies you would use as enforcement against aggressive action on EU bought US products. Or for some it does, it gives itself immunity from them like the ICJ.
Also considering the US's unilateral and often violent and aggressive and illegal way of doing things, especially with this administration, I think we're a bit past hypothetical meteor-like hypotheticals.
At this point any usage of destructive leverage the USA has over Europe should be seen as a real possibility, if not a likely one, when it comes to negotiation with or the expansionist desires of the USA.
Didn’t the International Criminal Court went through a test run of this which shows it’s at least feasible [0].
While MS didn’t cut off the whole organization and try to soften the language around what they did, it seems they could be compelled to do so under more strict executive sanctions.
I don’t think an entire institution would suddenly come crashing to its knees but it would certainly be a pressing problem to be facing if the US or some other state actor was also mounting some other form of pressure or attack.
The US Implemented sanctions on the ICJ and they have to emergency migrate out of their O365 tenant. The US also recently stationed the former EU commissioner who was the architect of the Digital Markets Act.
So while unlikely, it is not a huge jump for the Trump administration to try sanctioning EU institutions they don't like.
How many tech people deep into open source are also going to be able to build convincing cases for governments? More importantly, to be more convincing than the sales people of MS/Amazon/Google who also have financial incentives to give away?
I don't think you'll get a complete switch here, this is looking more like "let's cultivate a backup option in case they really do start turning stuff off"
In the same way Poetin accelerated the move from his own fossil fuels to renewable energy, Trump is accelerating the move to non-US based technology. At least in my surroundings, "non-US based company" is a big plus in the purchasing process.
I don't think anybody understand how bad it really is. Forget about Greenland. Trump can say "give me Germany or I'll shutdown Azure ID" and we will have to give him Germany. At this point we are just praying that neither him or any of his hawks realize this.
I agree that many countries are indeed very vulnerable to this, but you somehow managed to overstate the case by some orders of magnitude.
Silicon Valley flipping the switch on a country would sure cause short-term chaos and longer-term significant inconvenience. But when push comes to shove, bureaucracy gets moved aside, creative workarounds pop up, and people make do, somehow. We've seen that happen during COVID-19 lockdowns.
And after some time, the boycotted regions will find themselves with a healthy independent software industry. Silicon Valley's global impact would be greatly reduced, because any mildly sensible country would want to reduce its exposure and some serious competition will finally get traction.
I think the hawks realize all this. Though it's of course impossible to predict what the Chaos Monkey in Chief will do.
Europe does not need more open source, it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.
It doesn't matter if the email platform a government uses is open source, but it should be able to pick a local alternative. It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
Policy may help the European software industry, at least governments should actively work on getting away from their Microsoft addiction. Open source may be one of the options, but it is not the right model for all types of software.
Blindly preferring open source may kill otherwise viable local software businesses.
> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry
Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.
> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
I don't think they are talking about creating a mobile OS? But I do think that e-ID and similar government apps should be open source, so that people can trust them.
> Open source may be one of the options, but it is not the right model for all types of software.
Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.
> Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.
Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe? Concretely no. What's stopping this is that most governments in Europe are taxing companies to death to fund social services that end up in deficit anyway.
It's getting tiring of hearing of the big bad Microsoft that stops poor Europe from competing properly.
The EU tech salaries are ridiculously low and the tax burden is unreasonably high. Add on top of that an aversion to risk from the banks and VC funds in Europe and this is what you get.
> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source.
Or create an open source reference implementation and leave the final solution to the market. Everyone can use the reference implementation but if you think you can do better use your own. This includes a government doing it themselves either based on the reference implementation or not.
> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.
Yes. The government has more than enough leverage to demand this. Skill was never the problem. The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption. The problem with the regulations is that they were designed with the explicit intent to stifle competition.
"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" - This fact is pure corruption. I remember, when I was at university, one of the courses I took had a project management component and we did an assessment researching failed software projects and it turns out that there were a huge number of failed projects running in the hundreds of millions and even billions (and that was a lot of money at the time); always the same companies kept coming up. IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.
Idk, europeans saying thing like "It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive" implying EU companies are not anti-competitive and EU government is not extremely protectionist.
Europe is not one country, not even the EU is perfectly united. It's a dozen different countries, each with their own political and technical landscape, and Open Source is seen as the logical solution to unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator.
> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.
It has a good software industry, and it could of course be always better, but USA is still bigger and more dominating. Ther eis also a difference between software and service. Popular Cloud-services for common work is rare in Europe, building them is and making them popular, especially on a european level, is important.
> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
It's all about control. Open Source matters, becausse it gives more control, more insight, less chance some other country is spying on your and someday switching off something important.
> unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator
If you're afraid that one country might create a better software product/company and win the market and this would become 'unfair,' you've already lost the plot.
Instead of harnessing the best talent the EU has to offer, you're making sure they never get off the ground in the name of 'fairness.' Tall poppy syndrome in the extreme.
I'm sorry but the free market-denial that's become endemic among European central planners is getting wildly irrational at this point. Every year we creep closer to USSR-level government spending as % of GDP, crowding out private sector activity.
Do you understand that the entire tax base of the EU is dependent on private sector businesses competing with each other to offer better products and services? Unfairness and exceptionalism and its winners are what funds our entire way of life.
We can redistribute some of the earnings from the winners to the losers after the fact (as we already do at 50% on average). But we absolutely need to have the market competition to drive value in the first place for there to be anything to redistribute!
We've seen that some open source licenses make way for American money to steal the monetisation -- Elasticsearch found this to their peril when Amazon swooped in and offered it as a service
The other problem is the ability for American companies and funds to just buy European companies.
If Europe wants to stop this is needs to be very aware of the licensing agreements, and to pass laws to limit foreign investment - like China, India etc do.
No, it needs first to encourage local investment. Companies who seek investors or who get sold do not do it by pleasure, but as a last resort before dying. And in the EU you don't get any offer to save a company that has a limited commercial activity. Many companies die every day by lack of money. It turns our that US etc are willing to take much more risk and invest sufficient money to transform such fragile companies into durable ones. And in the case of software it's great, because software is sold all over the world, and the income serves to hire more local people, so in the end it's a way to really develop EU sales to the rest of the world. It would clearly be better if the investors were EU-based, but at least it's better than nothing that some investors are willing to risk their money on such companies.
It's not that simple. The Dutch government uses a commercial service for their digital id, and now that company is going to be sold into American hands.
I disagree. Let's say there's an app that stores healthcare data in an EU compliant format, there's 3 possibilities:
- Every country develops its own solution, which is good for employee demand, but can be inefficient
- Every country standardizes on a proprietary solution. The problem will be that said solution will most likely come from one of the major EU countries (say Germany) and others will feel left out and forced to use that solution. Said solution will be Germany-first, so local demands will have to go a slow and expensive contracting process. Said company will sell access to APIs, meaning integrating and building innovation on top will be tied to that commercial entity
- Every country uses the same standard software that's open source. There's no licensing fees, everyone can modify the code to accomodate local needs. Development costs are low. Proprietary local solution can be built on top without having to pay anyone.
It's clear to me, that when the customer is the public, and open-source solution should be preferred.
Anyway, open source is fine there. But you're not getting things like a Desktop or Web office suite (OpenOffice is an historical accident), an enterprise device management, endpoint security, ... this way.
They say "open source" but they are looking for "no-profit motive" IMO. Which is fine, but they should be opening a generous fund for democratically-run non-profits whose primary activity is developing open software which is useful for the EU and is an alternative to US corp-controlled software.
EU has plenty of these orgs it can generously fund, and scoping funding like this would create more. Some existing examples (many of which accept gov't funds but need a lot more to rival big tech):
In my opinion it's the opposite. This type of associations is welcome, and they are fine to promote free software and help people, but they are exactly like neighborhood associations: they're mostly local, relying on volunteers with limited time who become a new dependency for people who were not using these services. That's fine for limited use case but it doesn't scale at all, and causes a huge duplication of efforts (organization, software creation -- several of them reinvented stuff that already exists, advertising etc). And associations rarely if ever merge, because most often association creators have a very clear view of what they're seeking (often idealist) and are rarely willing to compromise it and accept to adopt another association's mostly similar but not exactly identical goals (it often works very similarly to political parties). GAFAMs would never exist under this model.
The problem is that such services which proudly run on low budget, volunteers and recycled hardware, cannot be relied on by companies without risking to enter legal trouble in case of major incident, so it means that a higher-grade service is still needed, with a dedicate funding, and we're facing fragmentation. We must not reproduce the scheme of cloudwatt either. Too much money injected into a wet dream that was only used to spend lots of money in consultants coming here just to confirm their presence and get their check.
What is needed instead is to sponsor the development of such activities by a few (2-3) well-established competing companies, so as to avoid the regular risk of monoculture that diverges from what users expect, and help them reach the point where their offerings can compete with GAFAM's for both end users and enterprise. The contract should be clear that services must rely on open formats, make it possible for leaving users to retrieve all their data, that software developed under such funding must be opensource, though technology acquisition is fine, and that these offerings must become self-sustaining at one point (i.e. a mix of free+paid services). The EU funders should have enough shares of these activities so that their permission is required for business acquisition and that they can restrict it to EU-based companies, so that such companies can still grow and seek public funding.
What we need is a few durable big players, not 10000 incompatible associations each with their own software suite, that no enterprise can trust over the long term and that cannot resist a trivial DDoS by lack of a robust infrastructure, and who are not organized enough to run full-stack security audits to make sure that user data are properly protected. These ones are only fine for friends and family but that's not what we're missing the most (the proof is that they already exist).
Why does the governments Microsoft addiction have anything to do with European software industry? Asking as an American whose governments are also addicted to Microsoft.
> Still - I hope EU will just have a decent program financing or contributing in any shape or form to development of OSS.
I think at this point we're beyond that, we already have these programs and they seem to be expanding. EU-STF is one such example, then there are other organizations supported by the EU in various ways, that also helps fund OSS, like NLnet Foundation.
Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"? If we leave aside all of the bureaucratic bs, political connections and corruption when it comes to obtaining these funds (for the most cases), how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants?
I get your pain point, but the stated objective is "Sovereignty" so having a fully localized OSS ecosystem that is anchored (can't be bought or moved) and operates independent of outsider (US, China, Russia, ...) upstream is in that case non negotiable.
Whether the EU will ever produce the necessary public investment to achieve this remains an open question.
My view is that there is commodity software and niche/specialized software. You find commercial solutions for both. But OSS is great for commodity software.
Everything becomes a commodity eventually. There's a lot of niche software that then goes mainstream, gets imitated by others, and becomes important to a wide range of sectors. A lot of that software usually ends up with very decent OSS alternatives. If it's worth having in OSS software form, usually somebody ends up working on it.
A lot of OSS projects are already leaning heavily on contributions from individuals and companies inside the EU. That's a good thing for the EU and something to stimulate and build on.
What the EU should do is keep an eye out for commodity software where it relies on non eu commercial software. Identify key areas where that is risky, e.g. communication software, IOT, or finance. And then stimulate members to switch to OSS alternatives if they exist and invest in the creation/support of such alternatives if they are important. OSS software doesn't just create itself, it needs backing from companies which could use the support in the form of grants.
That could include support for non EU OSS projects. There's nothing wrong with OSS from abroad. As long as this software is properly governed and vital to the EU, the EU should ensure those projects are healthy and future proofed. It should ensure local software companies get the support they need to do the right things here. This should ensure projects that are important don't run out of funding. And the EU can stimulate OSS development into strategic new areas with incentives. And make sure that EU companies that back this are successful internationally. This turns the tables on other countries maybe depending more on EU sourced software. The EU doesn't have to follow; it can lead.
If the objective is "Sovereignty", as clearly stated in the context, then Open Source is potentially a good strategy, but in itself not sufficient. E.g. Switching from Windows Server to RHEL gives you an Open Source initiative, but leaves you (arguably less, but still) dependent on the US.
For Open Source to work "Sovereign" you need to establish an local independent EU maintenance, development and distribution ecosystem for the specific packages that can operate autonomously and independent of upstream.
No, I mean an entire EU software ecosystem that can keep the lights on even under extreme sanctions from US (or Russia, or China, but we are in practice mostly dependent on US). You can have your local GitHub mirror, but if projects are forced to stop exporting to and collaborating with EU developers, who in the EU will maintain and further develop the now isolated EU codebases?
Don't know if they will get valuable feedbacks but yes, what is needed as always is money. Ever by financing projects or buying solutions that would develop them.
As said by someone else, not do the usual wasteful:
- Create a big global project with a tender directed at bullshit consulting companies and big groups.
- Giving millions/billions to recreate a crappy version of something instead of pushing existing solutions.
Also, I have the feeling that an important point is that "open source" software is Open Source, and the proper solution is to fund good OSS software or stacks wherever they come from and not be short sighted of taking to much care of the dev or project location. Even if obviously it would be better that money goes to European devs)
I feel like now, more than ever, the time is right for the EU's move to open-source to succeed.
Linux Desktop is now simply better than Windows, by far. Open office is good. There are many high-quality, commercially supported open-source products available now, developed by full-time, highly talented engineers.
There's every chance that this will work & breaking up oligopolies is great for everyone, not just Europe.
I find it endlessly fascinating how governments always get lost in the symptoms of the problems at hand instead of addressing the underlying problem itself.
The EU has no viable software industry because there's no real single market to fundraise from and sell into (no single capital market, no single language market, no single regulatory market, etc).
The lack of domestic EU software/hardware products sits entirely downstream of that issue. The open source community will not magically solve this problem for them.
What if we stopped wasting time on anything that is not solving the core issue. The symptoms will take care of themselves after you solve the disease.
How is this not solving the core issue? You need to do both. Ensure the software is made (pay devs), and if you're funding this, make sure it is licensed as a public good (free, oss).
The problem with putting on band-aids over core structural issues is the government projects are going to run into the same fragmentation issues that private sector ones have. Open source is not a magic wand you can wave to fix that.
You only need to the solve the core issue. Unless you believe humans born on the European continent are inherently less intelligent or motivated than those born on American soil, then quite literally the problem will solve itself.
All humans are the same species and respond to the same incentives. Just create similar incentives here and stop trying to top-down solve all the symptoms with bandaids after the fact. It just doesn't work.
Name me one example of EU government created software that people have ever chosen to use voluntarily. Or heck, even one that people are forced to use but isn't downright terrible compared to a private alternative.
I think you are just decribing one factor that caused the problem. There is many a detailed analysis, the most respected being the one by Draghi.
Previously this also wasn't much of a problem. The US tech companies were international companies and less "US" companies. Now they aligned themselves with the US regime and are e.g. a supply chain vulnerability and properly taxing them causes issues in national defence (via Ukraine). I for one did not anticipate this own-goal w.r.t. Europe by the US.
They should make it easier to run own businesses in Europe, lessen then amount of paperwork and red tape. It's impossible to start a tech business under the amount of bureaucracy they throw at you.
I'd love to give it a go, but to get even started I have to pay accountants, banks, lawyers, pre-taxes, etc before I even have made a single cent.
Draghi report made it abundantly clear that this is the big issue. Despite being outwardly unified, EU market is horribly fractured, with regulations building on top of EU standards in almost every state and every area of business.
Then there are high energy costs, high salary costs, limited mobility of the workforce (partly due to ongoing housing crisis), entrenched overseas competition that doesn't have to deal with same challenges.
Together, these add to a deadly mix. Paradoxically, software is less affected than other industries. But even here it's bad.
Is it? If you're not interested in limited liability it's 85 euros to file for a company. If you do want limited liability, you have to visit a notary to found, but even that's only like 500 euros.
Sure, you have to do your taxes every year and that's annoying, but it's not _that_ hard.
Why is that even necessary in the first place? Thats what people hate about bureaucracy. Why can't we just submit a form somewhere from home and someone looks over it from a queue. In the meantime you are allowed to start your business already. Bad process here. No process is 100% times better. An async one with forgiveness is getting you 80% there.
These are fair points but the weight of their impact is a misconception. Times and times again, lower capital and investment risk aversion are shown to be the limiting factors.
As a South American, it’s striking to see how the current U.S. administration has forced other countries to confront the risks of not having their own digital infrastructure.
And this isn’t just about software or the cloud. What happens if tomorrow the U.S. forbids Apple from selling iPhones outside its borders? Or starts requiring built-in backdoors or kill switchs?
Scenarios like these raise a deeper question: could this push the most powerful players, the US, EU, China, and India to eventually rebuild entire technology stacks from scratch in the name of self preservation?
China is on the path to doing just that, and I expect the heads of the government (or at least the people behind the scenes) in both EU and India consider this.
The US has, unfortunately, proven to be a very unreliable partner.
The problem isn’t only the U.S. China is also unreliable, and Russia as well. Just look at what happened to the EU with its dependence on Russian gas: once the war in Ukraine started, that dependency immediately turned into a major vulnerability.
That's the goal of the nationalists, which includes the current US administration and many in business and prominently in SV. Why do they want to sacrifice their own wealth, and freedom and peace worldwide? It's an important question.
Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"?
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Basically without open source, the rest of the world will have to keep paying a tithe to American companies, and hence tax in the USA.
One of the most useful steps would be to support codeforges like Github on European soil, and development of the ForgeFed project, so that those forges can talk to each other.
There was a grant in 2023 which was supported by the European Comission. So I think the topic itself isn't entirely unknown.
https://nlnet.nl/project/Forgejo/
From my experience, people against open source often have buyers remorse. They often paid egregious sums of money for proprietary software that, to be fair, works well and includes enterprise support. When the same someone encounters the same solution but free and open source, they start rationalizing. The difference is mainly marketing, where open source projects have little to no marketing budget and are largely denied by market makers. Proprietary solutions can afford the seminars, thousands of dollars a week on ads, and other perks which increase discovery.
The moral of the story is to be careful listening to people actively tarnishing open source as they are a crowd of bitter people. A tell-tale sign is that they don't talk about the benefits of proprietary technologies such as the level of customer support and technical expertise that comes with the bill and instead only bash on open source.
Opensource is a bit more complex than being a "public good". They're focusing on the low cost as a jump starting point, which make me doubt their sincerity/understanding about managing that relationship healthily.
Has the EU commission still not understood that becoming a paid-by Washington lobby group, does not work for Europeans? So, why are they so slow in pushing into action here? Rather than money going into US corporations, have EU citizens work on specific open source projects, many of them, with clear goals. Simple example: libreoffice - improve interfacing with it. ALL governments, universities etc... would benefit from this. Not only in the EU but elsewhere too. I don't understand this insane slowness here, unless lobbyists run Brussels already.
This sounds more negative than I want it to, but it seems like this is missing the forest for the trees. There's absolutely a real problem here and I am fully supportive of projects seeking to address this.
Governments around the world throw public money at private enterprise to solve all of their IT problems. This sounds good, I guess, to the Americans in the room. Until recently the US actually had a great number of "open source" projects -- NASA, NOAA, come to mind (the weather satellites are still going). Open projects, owned by the people -- this is the obviously correct way to do things. You can engage the business sector when it makes sense to do so, but a country shouldn't be run by -- be dependent on -- a Microsoft, or a PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Then they delete the production database and write the people a post mortem about how they'll improve for next time. Then they profit from war crimes that your government even quietly admits are a bad thing occasionally. Then they <if you aren't aware of the UK post office scandal, you should be>.
"Open source" isn't a solution. Free software would be a better look. But the entire world is completely dependent on IT systems and goverments don't employ enough software developers. Not "developers" to "refresh" the UI again, not Autodesk certified Call of Duty Black Ops 9 Micopilot Copilot 666 developers -- normal boring software developers -- public servants.
Make it dull. It's your people you're fucking with. Flashy app bad, boring UI good -- it's a tax return.
The thing that should be happening is serious public sector software development. By the people, for the people. Keep it in-house. I shouldn't have to say to keep it open. It belongs to the people.
I feel bad saying this as open source software developer, but what EU needs is in-house produced x86 compatible cpu to run the software they want as long as they want.
I see some people donating money to open source. I'm currently discussing with my bookkeeper but she says it's all personal, so I pay income tax (in the Netherlands) and then I can donate. Is this really true? Why can't I just give some money to the devs that develop the software I use in my business, as a business? It makes it twice as expensive.
I consider much bigger problem dependence on foreign ecosystems and data storages. This is of course useful but I would consider much more efficient some kind of incentives to build domestic alternative to ms office cloud solution which basically run all corps.
I'm going to send them my wishlist to see what happens. I'm not optimistic about this, but I'm not pessimistic either and am very curious to see what happens.
I don't have one yet, unfortunately. But it's definitely going to include immich (not EU software I think), nextcloud, some form of email server, a secure chat app (which I don't think the EU has), mastodon, an android spinoff like GrapheneOS, Linux (ofc), open source EU LLMs, and I don't know much else, I'll have to think about it more.
If I was better versed in writing and happened to be someone relevant, at the very least I’d support the viewpoint that open source is good for preventing takeovers and software dependencies turning hostile (e.g. Valkey and OpenSearch at least existing) and preventing being held financially hostage in times of uncertainty (e.g. many Linux server side distros are free and FOSS relational DBs won’t bankrupt you).
Yet perhaps far too often people opt for Windows Server or SQL Server or Oracle DB, or other software like that - if you have a good reason to use them, sure, go ahead, but that shouldn’t be your default. I don’t want my tax money to be wasted so much when for at least a significant amount of projects out there, alternatives exist.
I’ve literally heard people say in person that “we need paid support” even when they don’t and while I’m not sure what lead to that behavior of trying to shift blame and cover your own asses, but cut it out. If you need support so bad, get an org for FOSS projects or contribute directly in exchange for it!
This also has implications on development that you normally don't think about - I have personally suffered due to having to use a shared Oracle DB for development (one dev breaking something breaks it for everyone) and not being able to easily setup containers especially because Oracle XE doesn't have feature parity and refuses to run the migrations. Just fucking use PostgreSQL, or even MariaDB.
Same goes for file formats, it made me quite angry when my university mandated that I use Microsoft Office for writing my bachelor's and master's papers, when LibreOffice is mostly good enough (only caveat was the references tracking being kind of jank, but in large part due to the university having very specific requirements in regards to how the references have to be formatted; personally I'd just prefer thesis.md/LaTeX/whatever but I guess we can't have everything). Same for Windows on pretty much all the computers. My country is already poor as shit, we might as well just acknowledge that and stop overpaying for literally everything to greedy orgs. They didn't even buy local and use something like OnlyOffice or paid someone that provides managed Nextcloud hosting or whatever.
At one point code I had written protected half the passwords on the entire Internet, and today around a quarter of all HTTP(S) traffic on the internet goes through software I have written ("Varnish").
That, and the fata morgana of retirement shimmering on my horizon, makes it my considered opinion that FOSS is the gift EU does not deserve, and runs a great risk of destroying on first contact.
However, closed source as we know it, is not compatible with an open, free and fair society, so I am more than aboard with the EU's long overdue recognition of FOSS as the way forward and out of the grubby, greedy claws of "Big Tech" and their endless enshitification of our lives.
The kind of FOSS software relevant to this discussion is usually rock steady and dependable in ways much commercial closed software, precisely because of the secrecy, can never be or become.
But the human communities which produces the FOSS software are fragile, fractious, and as a general rule, composed of people who may be great programmers, but who have absolutely no experience, and no interest, in fostering and stewarding stable human communities.
This is literally why there are who knows how many, different "distributions" of the Linux operating system, "window managers", "web-site frameworks" and programming languages.
Therefore the absolutely most important thing for EU to understand about FOSS, is that it probably is as close to the "ideal market", in the sense of economic theories, as anything will ever come: It literally costs nothing to become a competitor.
But that also means that if the EU member countries were to pick, no matter how fair and competently, a set of FOSS software to standardize on, and pour money into the people behind it, to provide the necessary resources to support and sustain the need for IT systems, for all the administrations in the EU countries, that software would instantly stop being FOSS - no matter what words the license might contain, because it would no longer be part of the market.
In other words: EU cannot "switch to FOSS", it would no longer be FOSS if EU did.
At the most fundamental level, the EU has three options:
1. Pick and bless a set of winners, consisting of:
a) Operating system, portable to any reasonable computer architecture.
b) Text-processing, suitable for tasks up to a book.
c) Spreadsheet
d) Email client.
e) Web Browser
f) Accounting software, suitable for small organizations.
and fund organizations to maintain, develop and support the software for the future as open source, turning that software into infrastructure like water, power and electricity, free for all, individuals, startups and established companies alike, to use and benefit from.
2. Continuously develop/pick, bless and meticulously enforce open standards of interoperability, and then "let the competition loose".
3. Both. By providing a free baseline and de-facto reference implementations for the open standards, "the market" will be free to innovate, improve and compete, but cannot (re)create walled gardens.
To everybody, me included, option two seems the ideologically "pure" choice, because we have all been brought to believe that "governments should not pick winners".
But governments have always picked winners. Today all of EU has 230VAC electrical grids, because EU picked that as a winner, thereby leveling the market to everybody's benefit.
Therefore I will argue, that the wise choice for EU is option three.
First, it will be incredibly cheap, as in just tens of millions of Euro per year, to provide all EU citizens with a free and trustworthy software platform to run on their computers.
Second, it can be done incredibly fast: From EU makes the decision, the first version can be release in a matter of months, if not weeks.
Third, it will guarantee interoperability of data.
"It literally costs nothing to become a competitor"
but
"The new strategy will address the economic and political importance of open source, as a crucial contribution to a strategic framework for EU technological sovereignty, competitiveness and cybersecurity." (as per the call document)
This means OSS, but with an ecosystem that does NOT rely on anything non-EU for development, maintenance and distribution. This brings the price from "literally costs nothing" to hundreds of millions Euro.
Evidence of what? Of the existence of open source? Of "open source" what? Software? Hardware? Its usage? The the communities behind various open source projects?
All the European Commission is interested in is getting software cheaper or for free.
If they were truly interested in freeing themselves from non-EU software, thereby preventing potential interference from (mostly) the US, they wouldn’t have chosen the path of soften the GDPR - that move mainly made the big tech happier.
Not quite. Harshness of regulations like GDPR is perhaps the primary reason why European tech entrepreneurs overwhelmingly choose to emigrate to the US when given choice.
70 propositions from the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud, written in part by yours truly (in early 2025, i.e. before the "Trump effect" was in full force) and published by the Commission in July 2025:
Here is the complete list of proposals from the roadmap, translated into English and organised by pillar.
### Pillar 1: Technological Development
- Define technical specifications as open standards for European Open Source cloud, edge and IoT environments.
- Fund interoperability pilot projects that prioritise the use of European Open Source technologies.
- Require all EU-funded digital infrastructure projects to adhere to these interoperability standards.
- Promote and enforce the implementation of open standards throughout the EU.
- Create a ‘European Open Source Sovereignty Fund’ (EOSSF) dedicated to essential projects. [NB: this would now be called the EU-STF].
- Offer targeted grants for the security, maintenance and strengthening of the sovereignty of Open Source projects.
- Foster in-depth collaboration with European academic institutions and Open Source Programme Offices (OSPOs).
- Develop a practical guide for public procurement managers to evaluate European Open Source solutions.
- Create sector-specific reference architectures based on European Open Source technologies.
- Launch large-scale demonstration projects to illustrate the practical benefits of European Open Source solutions.
- Produce and distribute comprehensive ‘playbooks’ for the deployment of European Open Source solutions.
- Implement policies to actively encourage the adoption of these reference implementations in public procurement.
### Pillar 2: Skills Development
- Organise industry-focused training workshops with a European emphasis on Open Source tools and platforms.
- Offer targeted training grants to SMEs and public sector organisations for European Open Source skills development.
- Launch certification programmes for mastery of European Open Source technologies and standards.
- Establish EU-funded retraining programmes to help professionals transition into European Open Source roles.
- Collaborate with industry partners to create hands-on learning and placement opportunities in Open Source.
- Offer financial incentives to companies that participate in retraining programmes and use European Open Source.
- Develop a European Open Source resource platform that brings together training materials, best practices, and case studies.
- Integrate European Open Source principles into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curricula from secondary school to university.
- Support the creation of European Open Source ‘centres of excellence’ in universities.
- Develop EU-wide coding competitions and hackathons focused on European Open Source solutions.
- Introduce training on European Open Source business models into vocational training.
- Create vocational training modules for European Open Source project management.
- Establish certification for mastery of European Open Source business skills.
### Pillar 3: Public Procurement Practices
- Launch a consultation with public sector bodies and Open Source providers to identify challenges related to public procurement.
- Make ‘Public Money, Public Code, Open Source First, European Preference’ policies mandatory in public procurement.
- Develop comprehensive guidelines for public procurement to evaluate and select European Open Source solutions.
- Fund demonstration projects showing the success of replacing proprietary systems with European Open Source.
- Establish clear criteria for defining what constitutes a ‘European’ Open Source solution.
- Provide a practical guide for public procurement managers to evaluate Open Source solutions.
- Collaborate with industry and standardisation bodies to develop accessible evaluation criteria for Open Source.
- Create a public directory of recommended European Open Source solutions.
- Encourage public sector organisations to adopt solutions developed under the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.
- Launch cross-border pre-commercial procurement (PCP) projects focused on European Open Source.
- Create knowledge-sharing platforms for feedback on PCP initiatives and Open Source best practices.
- Actively involve European Open Source providers in the co-design of solutions in the PCP process.
- Publish guidelines to help public sector organisations manage and support European Open Source.
- Promote the active participation of public sector representatives in European Open Source communities.
- Support training programmes for public sector staff on project management and Open Source compliance.
- Engage stakeholders to collaboratively refine and simplify procurement practices for Open Source.
### Pillar 4: Growth and Investment
- Create a European Open Source Investment Platform (EOSIP) to centralise information on funding.
- Organise information workshops for European SMEs and start-ups on how to obtain investment.
- Establish partnerships with private investors to form a network of venture capital funds focused on European Open Source.
- Expand the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative with a focus on Open Source cloud, edge and IoT.
- Regularly assess the impact of funding programmes on community growth and market adoption.
- Allocate dedicated funding to high-impact European Open Source projects that meet strategic needs.
- Develop co-investment models that combine public funds with European private sector investments.
- Launch accelerators and incubators specifically designed for European Open Source technologies.
- Develop an EU-wide branding strategy to highlight the quality and sovereignty of European Open Source.
- Showcase European Open Source successes on international platforms through marketing campaigns.
- Form strategic partnerships with European industry organisations to increase project visibility.
- Establish public-private R&D consortia on European Open Source for high-priority projects.
- Offer incentives for private sector contributions to critical European Open Source initiatives.
- Develop platforms for knowledge exchange and cross-sector collaboration within the European ecosystem.
### Pillar 5: Governance
- Conduct vulnerability assessments for critical European Open Source projects.
- Collaborate with European cybersecurity agencies to develop threat models for Open Source environments.
- Publish findings and best practices from security assessments to the European ecosystem.
- Offer tailored compliance advice to help European Open Source projects navigate EU regulations.
- Facilitate accessibility to Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) certification for European Open Source projects.
- Provide resources and support for the documentation and auditing of European projects.
- Ensure stable, long-term funding for core European Open Source infrastructure.
- Establish mentoring programmes focused on developing European talent for critical projects.
- Create a European Open Source Advisory Board to oversee project funding and direction.
- Require EU-supported European projects to adhere to transparent governance and accountability practices.
- Support European community involvement in Open Source project governance.
- Facilitate community input into European Open Source policy development.
- Publish guidelines on best practices for managing the lifecycle of European Open Source projects.
- Provide resources for responsible maintenance and end-of-life support for European projects.
- Encourage comprehensive documentation and knowledge sharing within the European ecosystem.
It's some utopian dream to think the death of the EU would decentralize power. It's currently a necessary evil to put pressure on the already centralized power of the US global hegemony. Without the EU, the world is controlled by the US and China.
> It's currently a necessary evil to put pressure on the already centralized power of the US global hegemony.
How can I opt out of this "necessary evil"?
I don't want to be part of this feud between powers as I don't want the EU to be a world power since in all world powers 90% of the wealth just concentrates to the top 1% anyway, so becoming one would not benefit me. Will housing be more affordable once we become a "world power"? Or fix healthcare shortages?
Like for example, the public transport and healthcare where I live have been going to shit past 10 years plus housing become unaffordable. Those issues are not China's fault, Trump's fault and not Putin's fault no matter how much they try to gaslight us otherwise. Putin and Trump didn't come here and inflate our currency creating speculative bubbles that popped, our own politicians did.
So no, it's not a "necessary evil", it's a manufactured one via FUD and scaremongering, to deflect blame and responsibility for failures of local politicians and copot public option in the direction the 1% financieres desire since their kids won't be on the frontline of this new world war they're trying to stir up, we'll all be just casualties and I don't want to be one.
To me this is the most amazing thing people that would turn themselves inside out against communism/socialism because of the lies they have been told. When it actually comes down to it are all for communism ie open source
Open source is not communism. Communism would entail that we collectively own Linux, which we don't. It's private property, and if we want to use the code, we need to abide by its licensing terms. Licensing terms that are built upon the existence of copyright, a concept that allows for private ownership of intellectual property.
Communism is about a would-be utopia after the workers own the means of production.
For us tech workers, it could be argued that the means of production are source code. Thus, there is a socialist aspect to open source - but that's a good thing!
Just because it's free? Let's talk again when all open source projects are funded and controlled by the state with zero competition between them and no consumer choice. Only one Linux distro, only one database, only one web framework, etc. And it's decided top-down from the state what to work on. I doubt though that these projects would have started in the first place in a communist setting.
There is no reason such a state would have to set things up this way.
As an example: you probably know that germany has socialized healthcare. It is, however, not implemented as a single-payer model. Instead there are tons of different insurances competing with each other, while having a highly regulated floor of what they MUST offer.
Is the model perfect? Hell no, it has tons of issues - though overall it's pretty solid. My point is just that social policies and "no internal competition ever" does absolutely not have to go hand in hand. There is a massive middle ground.
See: social democracy as a concept and in its current implementation.
This is as usual confused. People keep discussing communism as if they were (via analogy) talking about capitalism being about men in suites with fake smiles, green paper, bank vaults, and powerpoint presentations. Every time people have to respond with paragraphs upon paragraphs just unrolling all that nonsense.
Try to update your knowledge on the subject instead of talking like an alien in Trafalgar Square.
Politics should never drive technical decisions unless the people involved actually understand the technology. When policy is made without that expertise, open source becomes a political slogan instead of a sustainable ecosystem.
What the European Commission is doing is the right thing, then.
It is a "call for evidence", not a directive. It can be summarized as: for our software needs, we depend too much on non-EU countries, we heard about this open source thing, will it solve our problem?
They studied the political aspect (dependence on non-EU countries), that's their job. They are now asking experts about the technical aspect.
This can never be true. Politics drives all decisions.
National politics may not. But assuming technical decisions are made on an aethereal plane above humanity is just assuming away complexity. It's the excuse of a technical team that developed something superb for no actual user.
I actually think it's a great idea to minimize government dependence on specific vendors at a policy level.
Perhaps these policies shouldn't be too detailed, but signing away future freedom ('nobody ever fired for choosing $entranched_bigcorp') should not be the path of least resistance for decision makers.
At first your comment reads as negative, but you actually like this "call for evidence" then, as they're explicitly asking for feedback about it? Not sure why it reads so negative when you're actually seemingly agreeing with the submission.
I think this was disused a few days ago in a similar HN comment thread. Turns out, the US has way more data-tapping anti-privacy laws than the EU - only that the US more or less secretly adopted them and forbids any company from telling their end-users.
Whereas you hear more about "data regulation-attempts" in the EU because it actually still has very strong privacy-rules and when trying to alter them there is a real public debate and not a hush-hush secret commission that gives security agencies access to all user data without public notification.
Europe already have a thriving software industry, and in fact is probably the leader when it comes to having the most influential and biggest FOSS projects, since so many of them originate in Europe :)
If I had to chose between "control and regulation and healthy community of FOSS" vs "no control or regulation, and healthy community only for for-profit companies", I know what side I'm choosing.
When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.
The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.
With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)
The consultation is great and all but
As someone who has watched on the sidelines how Opensource governance turns projects into hydra monsters (Redhat, Jakarta EE). I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.
But who knows, maybe they will just become end users of a popular distro and other opensource software.
Finland (where Linux comes from) is in the EU. There are also a few European linux distributions you may have heard of: e.g. Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu (UK), Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia, Knoppix, etc.
Is all the distributions where most core developers already live in Europe/EU not enough for you? Take a look at where most of the active contributors live for some distributions, and I think you'd be surprised :)
With my original flippant comment I was trying to highlight that despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators.
When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.
The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.
With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)
The consultation is great and all but I am skeptical, so I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.
I agree with others here that focusing your eyes on _using_ open source is, at least, an incomplete view of the problem.
What we (European software engineers) have been arguing, is that software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak. Thinking that open source software will help solve your budget and/or political problem is not something we're interested in doing for free. This excerpt here:
> In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has
suggests they see it as free candy, rather than the result of love and hard work, provided for free because it's nice. Pay for what you use, especially at the government level.
Of course, I strongly encourage the European governments to invest in open source. And if you're interested in giving money, I'm interested in doing work. Same as ever.
> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak
Anyone who agrees with this should sign this petition made by Free Software Foundation Europe: https://publiccode.eu
While I agree with the sentiment I'm not sure this is actually viable.
For example here in Poland the previous govt invested in huge amount of software for digital govt services. From company formation, social insurance/heathcare (things like electronic prescriptions and patient data) to tax submission at all levels.
All of this is implemented using publicly documented open standards so anyone can write a client for these services, or anyone can use official Web clients, but none of the code is open source.
This is in contrast to previous governments that tried to implement all of this using proprietary standards where the companies hired were paid billions to deliver a system and they ended up owning the data exchange protocol and a client they distributed in binary only form. And they also profited from commercial software that implemented their proprietary protocols.
That worked (for the company hired)for taxes and they made billions. But for other stuff like medical, when they had no way to sell their proprietary standards they wasted billions and years of time and delivered nothing. Then subsequent govt threw the entire project out and built it on open standards.
So based on this experience I think using well documented open data exchange standards is much more important than software itself being open source.
Who cares the server side software is open source if you still can't submit your taxes with your own python script?
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> … public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed
That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.” I do understand the potential for misinterpretation, but one could easily add “after paying for it” and those freedoms don’t change.
English centric, although other languages may have collapsed gratis and liber into a single word.
> That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.”
It occurs to me that this is a rather US-centric analogy.
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Well if let’s say local government like municipalities are paying for school software where you can check your child ren grades.
If there is API I should be able to make my own mobile app to access data or use other app.
Providers push ads and do shitty stuff to block any and all 3rd party access.
If it is that bad business just go away.
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>That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.”
what the hell does that mean
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Many projects made with government money are developed under the EUPL. Including some of the ones I've worked on. Oddly enough, they aren't available for download anywhere.
There is some EUPL software available here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/
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Just to second what you are saying, over 2025 we saw some cases where small open source projects that underpin massive infrastructure are struggling for funding, and they don't even need that much! To me this is a place where the EU can spend a few dollars and have a massive influence on the sustainability and direction of open source projects.
European software industry is so interesting because my impression is that the (Western) OSS sector is largely supported by talented European developers. Just a vibe from interacting with hundreds of successful OSS projects.
Europe clearly has endemic talent, and I'm not even sure it's a funding problem rather than an organizational/leadership one. They could throw money at developers who already have decent if humble QoL, or they could bring them together to build large systems that can compete with American big tech.
I wonder if this is useful feedback to give? It would probably need to be more actionable. I’m hopeful the European open source community will take this invitation seriously.
Very few people truely understand the concept of Liberty.
FSFE campaign for that: https://publiccode.eu/
> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions
I think that might be the wrong approach, at least in this day and age. The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue. It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.
Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue
Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.
>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yes, of course.
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> It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.
When it is funded publicly it certainly is. A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame. If something is going to be commercially valuable then people should develop it in the private sphere. Nothing stopping them. In fact, that is basically what the US does and it has been wildly successful and relegated the EU to being a technical backwater trying to figure out how to get out from under the US's commercial dominance.
> Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yes. Knowledge is for everyone. Even the Americans. Trying to hold back the progress of the entire species because the US knows how to pump out software is a remarkably myopic strategy.
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The early mantras of OSS included "free as in speech" and "free as in beer".
Those were mantras of the Free Software movement. The open source movement (despite creating a lot of free software) was never about the moral stance of software freedom, but the practical benefits
So, as open source developers building a public good, where is our share of EU taxes?
Do you mean paying EU taxes for doing open-source? :)
> software that is funded by public means
What fraction of global software spending does the EU command?
I love the vision. I'm just sceptical of how seriously it's being pursued if it's another Brussels project without resource commitments.
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The EU definitely has no concept of "love". It was founded to make trade easier. All the fuzz about humane values and morals has been tacked on more or less recently, to keep up the support for it from the population. It is the literal wolf in sheep's clothing.
It was founded to make world war 3 impossible /through/ trade. By intertwining the economies of countries that considered each other hereditary enemies (Erbfeinde in German), it sought to make war too costly to consider. Humanitarian values are a core part of what became the EU.
That's one of the reasons the EU has had so many political problems with Hungary and Poland in the last decade: their drift to authoritarian forms of government (including weakening the judiciary in Poland) didn't impact trade at all. Nonetheless, it went against the humanitarian values.
I'm no EU fanboy (there's plenty to criticize), but regarding chat control and surveillance, it's important to see from which part of the EU institutions the push comes: the council. The council consists of the governments of the member states. It's not the big bad EU trying to force surveillance on the innocent countries; it's the governments trying to push domestically unpopular surveillance through the EU. The directly elected EU parliament has so far always prevented this push.
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Yet because of it's existence, thousands of people have been able to love beyond their countries borders.
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What does "wolf in sheep's clothing" mean for you, concretely, outside of metaphors?
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The US was founded to not pay taxes... Come on, you know well that most things evolve and grow.
Subsidiarity has been a key building block of the EU and has failed the EU for unexpected reasons. Subsidiarity was pursued for accountability and to make the EU less centralized - decisions should be made at the lowest, most local level possible, with central authorities only stepping in when a task cannot be effectively handled locally. However, it means that here in Sweden govt bodies are all individually moving to Azure, because each one makes that local decision in their best interest. The same thing has happened all over the EU - and very few govt bodies would ever take the risk of investing in using EU cloud or data platforms. We need public procurement to help kickstart life into the Eurostack.
The EU has Schleswig-Holstein (a German state) as an example; office software and email replaced by open source alternatives. Look overthere, I would say. But overthere is a politician who actually understands what he is talking about.
I don't feel the need to provide governments/politicians with open source software who think like this: "open source – which is a public good to be freely used".
Start understanding how this works, because your American and Chinese counterparts do a better job at this.
By the way, don't come lazily asking for input. Go out proactively and find the answers yourself.
> By the way, don't come lazily asking for input. Go out proactively and find the answers yourself.
The EU very regularly asks for input on new policy initiatives, it's one of the better aspects of the legislative/policy-making process. They are asking citizens' opinions on a policy that will potentially affect them, if you tell them to f off and do it themselves then don't be surprised when you hate the policy that comes out of it.
I don't tell them to F off, I give them my citizen opinion on HN. I expect their policy to be in their best interest, and I stopped hating on that a long time ago.
> The EU very regularly asks for input on new policy initiatives, it's one of the better aspects of the legislative/policy-making process.
And then it basically ignores all the input and moves forward with policies like chat control that are widely unpopular anyway. So much for consulting the people and asking for feedback.
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They also have a major german city (Munich) who moved to Open Source, gave up and moved back. The SH project is rather new.
A long time ago Amazon tried to acquire a good online business diapers.com and initially the owners refused. Amazon proceded to get investors or lenders to funds 200 million dollars to undercut sales of diapers.com. Fast forward they were close to bankruptcy and owners were forced to sell it off for a bargain to Amazon. Since then the price of diapers have risen to be very profitable.
The point being that any businesses that sell proprietary software will do the same to kill competition, but in the long run they will end up costing more.
The real issue is government spending is that procurement is very broken even if you would opt for buying support for open source Software. This is not a problem China nor North Korea have due to how corporations have no easy way to influence politics in those Authoritarian countries.
It’d be a shame if MS was compelled by the current US administration to shutdown EU users of CoPilot/365/whatever. Whole agencies within governments lose all of their data and can barely function.
A move to alternatives is an imperative! I hope it works for them and stimulates their tech sector.
As a Linux guy for many a year, I've often said that going all-in on Microsoft tech stacks is like painting yourself into a corner. It all looks like it's going fine until you decide that you want to leave the room.
It'd be a shame if an asteroid struck earth tomorrow as well.
But given limited resources, we tend not to devote a ton of resources to every possible tail risk since there's millions of them.
Europe should focus on building domestic tech capacity for other reasons (our own future prosperity being one), but being worried about Microsoft Word access over some silly news headlines is not one of them.
Every single productivity suite can open/modify word docs and powerpoints and excel formats. This is not a huge issue.
The US doesnt recognize many of the bodies you would use as enforcement against aggressive action on EU bought US products. Or for some it does, it gives itself immunity from them like the ICJ.
Also considering the US's unilateral and often violent and aggressive and illegal way of doing things, especially with this administration, I think we're a bit past hypothetical meteor-like hypotheticals.
At this point any usage of destructive leverage the USA has over Europe should be seen as a real possibility, if not a likely one, when it comes to negotiation with or the expansionist desires of the USA.
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Didn’t the International Criminal Court went through a test run of this which shows it’s at least feasible [0].
While MS didn’t cut off the whole organization and try to soften the language around what they did, it seems they could be compelled to do so under more strict executive sanctions.
I don’t think an entire institution would suddenly come crashing to its knees but it would certainly be a pressing problem to be facing if the US or some other state actor was also mounting some other form of pressure or attack.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/31/international_crimina...
The US Implemented sanctions on the ICJ and they have to emergency migrate out of their O365 tenant. The US also recently stationed the former EU commissioner who was the architect of the Digital Markets Act.
So while unlikely, it is not a huge jump for the Trump administration to try sanctioning EU institutions they don't like.
How many tech people deep into open source are also going to be able to build convincing cases for governments? More importantly, to be more convincing than the sales people of MS/Amazon/Google who also have financial incentives to give away?
I don't think you'll get a complete switch here, this is looking more like "let's cultivate a backup option in case they really do start turning stuff off"
In the same way Poetin accelerated the move from his own fossil fuels to renewable energy, Trump is accelerating the move to non-US based technology. At least in my surroundings, "non-US based company" is a big plus in the purchasing process.
Yes, I think anyone with common sense is thinking that way these days. He's going to inflict huge damage on the US economy.
They are accelerating from snail speed to turtle speed.
I don't think anybody understand how bad it really is. Forget about Greenland. Trump can say "give me Germany or I'll shutdown Azure ID" and we will have to give him Germany. At this point we are just praying that neither him or any of his hawks realize this.
I agree that many countries are indeed very vulnerable to this, but you somehow managed to overstate the case by some orders of magnitude.
Silicon Valley flipping the switch on a country would sure cause short-term chaos and longer-term significant inconvenience. But when push comes to shove, bureaucracy gets moved aside, creative workarounds pop up, and people make do, somehow. We've seen that happen during COVID-19 lockdowns.
And after some time, the boycotted regions will find themselves with a healthy independent software industry. Silicon Valley's global impact would be greatly reduced, because any mildly sensible country would want to reduce its exposure and some serious competition will finally get traction.
I think the hawks realize all this. Though it's of course impossible to predict what the Chaos Monkey in Chief will do.
Maybe not that bad, but it does definitely give the US a major advantage diplomatically
Europe does not need more open source, it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.
It doesn't matter if the email platform a government uses is open source, but it should be able to pick a local alternative. It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
Policy may help the European software industry, at least governments should actively work on getting away from their Microsoft addiction. Open source may be one of the options, but it is not the right model for all types of software.
Blindly preferring open source may kill otherwise viable local software businesses.
> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry
Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.
> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
I don't think they are talking about creating a mobile OS? But I do think that e-ID and similar government apps should be open source, so that people can trust them.
> Open source may be one of the options, but it is not the right model for all types of software.
Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.
> Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.
Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe? Concretely no. What's stopping this is that most governments in Europe are taxing companies to death to fund social services that end up in deficit anyway.
It's getting tiring of hearing of the big bad Microsoft that stops poor Europe from competing properly.
The EU tech salaries are ridiculously low and the tax burden is unreasonably high. Add on top of that an aversion to risk from the banks and VC funds in Europe and this is what you get.
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> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source.
Or create an open source reference implementation and leave the final solution to the market. Everyone can use the reference implementation but if you think you can do better use your own. This includes a government doing it themselves either based on the reference implementation or not.
> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.
Yes. The government has more than enough leverage to demand this. Skill was never the problem. The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption. The problem with the regulations is that they were designed with the explicit intent to stifle competition.
"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" - This fact is pure corruption. I remember, when I was at university, one of the courses I took had a project management component and we did an assessment researching failed software projects and it turns out that there were a huge number of failed projects running in the hundreds of millions and even billions (and that was a lot of money at the time); always the same companies kept coming up. IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.
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What is a European made operating system I can purchase for my computer?
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Idk, europeans saying thing like "It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive" implying EU companies are not anti-competitive and EU government is not extremely protectionist.
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> Europe does not need more open source,
Europe is not one country, not even the EU is perfectly united. It's a dozen different countries, each with their own political and technical landscape, and Open Source is seen as the logical solution to unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator.
> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.
It has a good software industry, and it could of course be always better, but USA is still bigger and more dominating. Ther eis also a difference between software and service. Popular Cloud-services for common work is rare in Europe, building them is and making them popular, especially on a european level, is important.
> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
It's all about control. Open Source matters, becausse it gives more control, more insight, less chance some other country is spying on your and someday switching off something important.
> unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator
If you're afraid that one country might create a better software product/company and win the market and this would become 'unfair,' you've already lost the plot.
Instead of harnessing the best talent the EU has to offer, you're making sure they never get off the ground in the name of 'fairness.' Tall poppy syndrome in the extreme.
I'm sorry but the free market-denial that's become endemic among European central planners is getting wildly irrational at this point. Every year we creep closer to USSR-level government spending as % of GDP, crowding out private sector activity.
Do you understand that the entire tax base of the EU is dependent on private sector businesses competing with each other to offer better products and services? Unfairness and exceptionalism and its winners are what funds our entire way of life.
We can redistribute some of the earnings from the winners to the losers after the fact (as we already do at 50% on average). But we absolutely need to have the market competition to drive value in the first place for there to be anything to redistribute!
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We've seen that some open source licenses make way for American money to steal the monetisation -- Elasticsearch found this to their peril when Amazon swooped in and offered it as a service
The other problem is the ability for American companies and funds to just buy European companies.
If Europe wants to stop this is needs to be very aware of the licensing agreements, and to pass laws to limit foreign investment - like China, India etc do.
No, it needs first to encourage local investment. Companies who seek investors or who get sold do not do it by pleasure, but as a last resort before dying. And in the EU you don't get any offer to save a company that has a limited commercial activity. Many companies die every day by lack of money. It turns our that US etc are willing to take much more risk and invest sufficient money to transform such fragile companies into durable ones. And in the case of software it's great, because software is sold all over the world, and the income serves to hire more local people, so in the end it's a way to really develop EU sales to the rest of the world. It would clearly be better if the investors were EU-based, but at least it's better than nothing that some investors are willing to risk their money on such companies.
It's not that simple. The Dutch government uses a commercial service for their digital id, and now that company is going to be sold into American hands.
I disagree. Let's say there's an app that stores healthcare data in an EU compliant format, there's 3 possibilities:
- Every country develops its own solution, which is good for employee demand, but can be inefficient
- Every country standardizes on a proprietary solution. The problem will be that said solution will most likely come from one of the major EU countries (say Germany) and others will feel left out and forced to use that solution. Said solution will be Germany-first, so local demands will have to go a slow and expensive contracting process. Said company will sell access to APIs, meaning integrating and building innovation on top will be tied to that commercial entity
- Every country uses the same standard software that's open source. There's no licensing fees, everyone can modify the code to accomodate local needs. Development costs are low. Proprietary local solution can be built on top without having to pay anyone.
It's clear to me, that when the customer is the public, and open-source solution should be preferred.
This app currently runs on Android or iOS.
Anyway, open source is fine there. But you're not getting things like a Desktop or Web office suite (OpenOffice is an historical accident), an enterprise device management, endpoint security, ... this way.
There is another option, to develop pan-european software as it has been done in other areas such as aerospace.
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They say "open source" but they are looking for "no-profit motive" IMO. Which is fine, but they should be opening a generous fund for democratically-run non-profits whose primary activity is developing open software which is useful for the EU and is an alternative to US corp-controlled software.
EU has plenty of these orgs it can generously fund, and scoping funding like this would create more. Some existing examples (many of which accept gov't funds but need a lot more to rival big tech):
- https://framasoft.org/en/
- https://www.igalia.com/
- https://deuxfleurs.fr/
- https://www.chatons.org/
In my opinion it's the opposite. This type of associations is welcome, and they are fine to promote free software and help people, but they are exactly like neighborhood associations: they're mostly local, relying on volunteers with limited time who become a new dependency for people who were not using these services. That's fine for limited use case but it doesn't scale at all, and causes a huge duplication of efforts (organization, software creation -- several of them reinvented stuff that already exists, advertising etc). And associations rarely if ever merge, because most often association creators have a very clear view of what they're seeking (often idealist) and are rarely willing to compromise it and accept to adopt another association's mostly similar but not exactly identical goals (it often works very similarly to political parties). GAFAMs would never exist under this model.
The problem is that such services which proudly run on low budget, volunteers and recycled hardware, cannot be relied on by companies without risking to enter legal trouble in case of major incident, so it means that a higher-grade service is still needed, with a dedicate funding, and we're facing fragmentation. We must not reproduce the scheme of cloudwatt either. Too much money injected into a wet dream that was only used to spend lots of money in consultants coming here just to confirm their presence and get their check.
What is needed instead is to sponsor the development of such activities by a few (2-3) well-established competing companies, so as to avoid the regular risk of monoculture that diverges from what users expect, and help them reach the point where their offerings can compete with GAFAM's for both end users and enterprise. The contract should be clear that services must rely on open formats, make it possible for leaving users to retrieve all their data, that software developed under such funding must be opensource, though technology acquisition is fine, and that these offerings must become self-sustaining at one point (i.e. a mix of free+paid services). The EU funders should have enough shares of these activities so that their permission is required for business acquisition and that they can restrict it to EU-based companies, so that such companies can still grow and seek public funding.
What we need is a few durable big players, not 10000 incompatible associations each with their own software suite, that no enterprise can trust over the long term and that cannot resist a trivial DDoS by lack of a robust infrastructure, and who are not organized enough to run full-stack security audits to make sure that user data are properly protected. These ones are only fine for friends and family but that's not what we're missing the most (the proof is that they already exist).
Why does the governments Microsoft addiction have anything to do with European software industry? Asking as an American whose governments are also addicted to Microsoft.
We'll see how it goes this time.
If they once again go for creating their own forks, instead of financing development of existing software then I'll know the initiative failed.
Also imho their 'questions' mentioned in the comment kinda feel like they have answer baked in - like it's foregone conclusion.
Still - I hope EU will just have a decent program financing or contributing in any shape or form to development of OSS.
> Still - I hope EU will just have a decent program financing or contributing in any shape or form to development of OSS.
I think at this point we're beyond that, we already have these programs and they seem to be expanding. EU-STF is one such example, then there are other organizations supported by the EU in various ways, that also helps fund OSS, like NLnet Foundation.
Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"? If we leave aside all of the bureaucratic bs, political connections and corruption when it comes to obtaining these funds (for the most cases), how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants?
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I get your pain point, but the stated objective is "Sovereignty" so having a fully localized OSS ecosystem that is anchored (can't be bought or moved) and operates independent of outsider (US, China, Russia, ...) upstream is in that case non negotiable.
Whether the EU will ever produce the necessary public investment to achieve this remains an open question.
> they once again go for creating their own forks, instead of financing development of existing software then I'll know the initiative failed.
Once again? When did they do that? They have been funding various open source projects (like VLC, Libre Office) for quite a while:
I think Bavaria developed their own Linux distro instead of using an established one. It failed horrendously.
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Things like LiMux, I guess
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My view is that there is commodity software and niche/specialized software. You find commercial solutions for both. But OSS is great for commodity software.
Everything becomes a commodity eventually. There's a lot of niche software that then goes mainstream, gets imitated by others, and becomes important to a wide range of sectors. A lot of that software usually ends up with very decent OSS alternatives. If it's worth having in OSS software form, usually somebody ends up working on it.
A lot of OSS projects are already leaning heavily on contributions from individuals and companies inside the EU. That's a good thing for the EU and something to stimulate and build on.
What the EU should do is keep an eye out for commodity software where it relies on non eu commercial software. Identify key areas where that is risky, e.g. communication software, IOT, or finance. And then stimulate members to switch to OSS alternatives if they exist and invest in the creation/support of such alternatives if they are important. OSS software doesn't just create itself, it needs backing from companies which could use the support in the form of grants.
That could include support for non EU OSS projects. There's nothing wrong with OSS from abroad. As long as this software is properly governed and vital to the EU, the EU should ensure those projects are healthy and future proofed. It should ensure local software companies get the support they need to do the right things here. This should ensure projects that are important don't run out of funding. And the EU can stimulate OSS development into strategic new areas with incentives. And make sure that EU companies that back this are successful internationally. This turns the tables on other countries maybe depending more on EU sourced software. The EU doesn't have to follow; it can lead.
If the objective is "Sovereignty", as clearly stated in the context, then Open Source is potentially a good strategy, but in itself not sufficient. E.g. Switching from Windows Server to RHEL gives you an Open Source initiative, but leaves you (arguably less, but still) dependent on the US.
For Open Source to work "Sovereign" you need to establish an local independent EU maintenance, development and distribution ecosystem for the specific packages that can operate autonomously and independent of upstream.
something like a European GitHub you mean? (didn't read the article)
No, I mean an entire EU software ecosystem that can keep the lights on even under extreme sanctions from US (or Russia, or China, but we are in practice mostly dependent on US). You can have your local GitHub mirror, but if projects are forced to stop exporting to and collaborating with EU developers, who in the EU will maintain and further develop the now isolated EU codebases?
It's less than two hundred words long, I promise you it's not going to take very long to read
Don't know if they will get valuable feedbacks but yes, what is needed as always is money. Ever by financing projects or buying solutions that would develop them.
As said by someone else, not do the usual wasteful:
- Create a big global project with a tender directed at bullshit consulting companies and big groups. - Giving millions/billions to recreate a crappy version of something instead of pushing existing solutions.
Also, I have the feeling that an important point is that "open source" software is Open Source, and the proper solution is to fund good OSS software or stacks wherever they come from and not be short sighted of taking to much care of the dev or project location. Even if obviously it would be better that money goes to European devs)
Yep. If the EU wants to direct money to this "problem" then they need to mandate that companies have a "domestic" fallback vendor.
I feel like now, more than ever, the time is right for the EU's move to open-source to succeed.
Linux Desktop is now simply better than Windows, by far. Open office is good. There are many high-quality, commercially supported open-source products available now, developed by full-time, highly talented engineers.
There's every chance that this will work & breaking up oligopolies is great for everyone, not just Europe.
I wrote about this recently if you're interested: https://budibase.com/blog/updates/eu-digital-sovereignty-and...
I find it endlessly fascinating how governments always get lost in the symptoms of the problems at hand instead of addressing the underlying problem itself.
The EU has no viable software industry because there's no real single market to fundraise from and sell into (no single capital market, no single language market, no single regulatory market, etc).
The lack of domestic EU software/hardware products sits entirely downstream of that issue. The open source community will not magically solve this problem for them.
What if we stopped wasting time on anything that is not solving the core issue. The symptoms will take care of themselves after you solve the disease.
How is this not solving the core issue? You need to do both. Ensure the software is made (pay devs), and if you're funding this, make sure it is licensed as a public good (free, oss).
The problem with putting on band-aids over core structural issues is the government projects are going to run into the same fragmentation issues that private sector ones have. Open source is not a magic wand you can wave to fix that.
You only need to the solve the core issue. Unless you believe humans born on the European continent are inherently less intelligent or motivated than those born on American soil, then quite literally the problem will solve itself.
All humans are the same species and respond to the same incentives. Just create similar incentives here and stop trying to top-down solve all the symptoms with bandaids after the fact. It just doesn't work.
Name me one example of EU government created software that people have ever chosen to use voluntarily. Or heck, even one that people are forced to use but isn't downright terrible compared to a private alternative.
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I think you are just decribing one factor that caused the problem. There is many a detailed analysis, the most respected being the one by Draghi.
Previously this also wasn't much of a problem. The US tech companies were international companies and less "US" companies. Now they aligned themselves with the US regime and are e.g. a supply chain vulnerability and properly taxing them causes issues in national defence (via Ukraine). I for one did not anticipate this own-goal w.r.t. Europe by the US.
They should make it easier to run own businesses in Europe, lessen then amount of paperwork and red tape. It's impossible to start a tech business under the amount of bureaucracy they throw at you.
I'd love to give it a go, but to get even started I have to pay accountants, banks, lawyers, pre-taxes, etc before I even have made a single cent.
Draghi report made it abundantly clear that this is the big issue. Despite being outwardly unified, EU market is horribly fractured, with regulations building on top of EU standards in almost every state and every area of business.
Then there are high energy costs, high salary costs, limited mobility of the workforce (partly due to ongoing housing crisis), entrenched overseas competition that doesn't have to deal with same challenges.
Together, these add to a deadly mix. Paradoxically, software is less affected than other industries. But even here it's bad.
> They should make it easier to run own businesses in Europe, lessen then amount of paperwork and red tape.
These are not the main obstacles. US monopolies are. See this article: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
Is it? If you're not interested in limited liability it's 85 euros to file for a company. If you do want limited liability, you have to visit a notary to found, but even that's only like 500 euros. Sure, you have to do your taxes every year and that's annoying, but it's not _that_ hard.
> you have to visit a notary to found
Why is that even necessary in the first place? Thats what people hate about bureaucracy. Why can't we just submit a form somewhere from home and someone looks over it from a queue. In the meantime you are allowed to start your business already. Bad process here. No process is 100% times better. An async one with forgiveness is getting you 80% there.
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These are fair points but the weight of their impact is a misconception. Times and times again, lower capital and investment risk aversion are shown to be the limiting factors.
The first comment on the link is much more helpful than the article
https://lwn.net/Articles/1053131/
(yes it seems that comments are subarticles)
As a South American, it’s striking to see how the current U.S. administration has forced other countries to confront the risks of not having their own digital infrastructure.
And this isn’t just about software or the cloud. What happens if tomorrow the U.S. forbids Apple from selling iPhones outside its borders? Or starts requiring built-in backdoors or kill switchs?
Scenarios like these raise a deeper question: could this push the most powerful players, the US, EU, China, and India to eventually rebuild entire technology stacks from scratch in the name of self preservation?
Could this mean the end of a globalized world?
CALEA has given the FBI backdoor access to all telecom traffic for the past 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
China is on the path to doing just that, and I expect the heads of the government (or at least the people behind the scenes) in both EU and India consider this.
The US has, unfortunately, proven to be a very unreliable partner.
The problem isn’t only the U.S. China is also unreliable, and Russia as well. Just look at what happened to the EU with its dependence on Russian gas: once the war in Ukraine started, that dependency immediately turned into a major vulnerability.
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> Could this mean the end of a globalized world?
That's the goal of the nationalists, which includes the current US administration and many in business and prominently in SV. Why do they want to sacrifice their own wealth, and freedom and peace worldwide? It's an important question.
Hopefully it just means a world with redundant important production chains, rather than an end of all globalization.
Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Basically without open source, the rest of the world will have to keep paying a tithe to American companies, and hence tax in the USA.
One of the most useful steps would be to support codeforges like Github on European soil, and development of the ForgeFed project, so that those forges can talk to each other.
Codeberg and Forjeo have a foundation in Germany
And sourcehut in the Netherlands!
There was a grant in 2023 which was supported by the European Comission. So I think the topic itself isn't entirely unknown. https://nlnet.nl/project/Forgejo/
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So many strategies and initiatives, so little action.
From my experience, people against open source often have buyers remorse. They often paid egregious sums of money for proprietary software that, to be fair, works well and includes enterprise support. When the same someone encounters the same solution but free and open source, they start rationalizing. The difference is mainly marketing, where open source projects have little to no marketing budget and are largely denied by market makers. Proprietary solutions can afford the seminars, thousands of dollars a week on ads, and other perks which increase discovery.
The moral of the story is to be careful listening to people actively tarnishing open source as they are a crowd of bitter people. A tell-tale sign is that they don't talk about the benefits of proprietary technologies such as the level of customer support and technical expertise that comes with the bill and instead only bash on open source.
"Nobody" is against open source.
People are against bad products, high maintenance, high complexity... .. or against working for free without much reward.
It would be great if there was a way for humanity to have and develop free open source software but it's not obvious how to do it well.
Opensource is a bit more complex than being a "public good". They're focusing on the low cost as a jump starting point, which make me doubt their sincerity/understanding about managing that relationship healthily.
Has the EU commission still not understood that becoming a paid-by Washington lobby group, does not work for Europeans? So, why are they so slow in pushing into action here? Rather than money going into US corporations, have EU citizens work on specific open source projects, many of them, with clear goals. Simple example: libreoffice - improve interfacing with it. ALL governments, universities etc... would benefit from this. Not only in the EU but elsewhere too. I don't understand this insane slowness here, unless lobbyists run Brussels already.
This sounds more negative than I want it to, but it seems like this is missing the forest for the trees. There's absolutely a real problem here and I am fully supportive of projects seeking to address this.
Governments around the world throw public money at private enterprise to solve all of their IT problems. This sounds good, I guess, to the Americans in the room. Until recently the US actually had a great number of "open source" projects -- NASA, NOAA, come to mind (the weather satellites are still going). Open projects, owned by the people -- this is the obviously correct way to do things. You can engage the business sector when it makes sense to do so, but a country shouldn't be run by -- be dependent on -- a Microsoft, or a PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Then they delete the production database and write the people a post mortem about how they'll improve for next time. Then they profit from war crimes that your government even quietly admits are a bad thing occasionally. Then they <if you aren't aware of the UK post office scandal, you should be>.
"Open source" isn't a solution. Free software would be a better look. But the entire world is completely dependent on IT systems and goverments don't employ enough software developers. Not "developers" to "refresh" the UI again, not Autodesk certified Call of Duty Black Ops 9 Micopilot Copilot 666 developers -- normal boring software developers -- public servants.
Make it dull. It's your people you're fucking with. Flashy app bad, boring UI good -- it's a tax return.
The thing that should be happening is serious public sector software development. By the people, for the people. Keep it in-house. I shouldn't have to say to keep it open. It belongs to the people.
I feel bad saying this as open source software developer, but what EU needs is in-house produced x86 compatible cpu to run the software they want as long as they want.
I see some people donating money to open source. I'm currently discussing with my bookkeeper but she says it's all personal, so I pay income tax (in the Netherlands) and then I can donate. Is this really true? Why can't I just give some money to the devs that develop the software I use in my business, as a business? It makes it twice as expensive.
I think I'll use this opportunity to piggyback my opinion about [1] on my response to this call for evidence.
[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
I consider much bigger problem dependence on foreign ecosystems and data storages. This is of course useful but I would consider much more efficient some kind of incentives to build domestic alternative to ms office cloud solution which basically run all corps.
I read the call for evidence. I have a silly question: Where does one go to supply that evidence?
I found it!
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
You need an EU account though. I got one and I'm an American so it shouldn't be too tough.
I'm going to send them my wishlist to see what happens. I'm not optimistic about this, but I'm not pessimistic either and am very curious to see what happens.
Can we see your wishlist?
I don't have one yet, unfortunately. But it's definitely going to include immich (not EU software I think), nextcloud, some form of email server, a secure chat app (which I don't think the EU has), mastodon, an android spinoff like GrapheneOS, Linux (ofc), open source EU LLMs, and I don't know much else, I'll have to think about it more.
Maybe they should start by outlawing Google Play Integrity then. This will immediately make FOSS Android phones more useful in Europe.
The same commission that let every megaco bribe EU officials including the head of eu?
Sometimes I wonder where does the hypocrisy ends.
What open source leaders can help them? For example, does Linus Torvalds still feel connected to Europe?
If I was better versed in writing and happened to be someone relevant, at the very least I’d support the viewpoint that open source is good for preventing takeovers and software dependencies turning hostile (e.g. Valkey and OpenSearch at least existing) and preventing being held financially hostage in times of uncertainty (e.g. many Linux server side distros are free and FOSS relational DBs won’t bankrupt you).
Yet perhaps far too often people opt for Windows Server or SQL Server or Oracle DB, or other software like that - if you have a good reason to use them, sure, go ahead, but that shouldn’t be your default. I don’t want my tax money to be wasted so much when for at least a significant amount of projects out there, alternatives exist.
I’ve literally heard people say in person that “we need paid support” even when they don’t and while I’m not sure what lead to that behavior of trying to shift blame and cover your own asses, but cut it out. If you need support so bad, get an org for FOSS projects or contribute directly in exchange for it!
This also has implications on development that you normally don't think about - I have personally suffered due to having to use a shared Oracle DB for development (one dev breaking something breaks it for everyone) and not being able to easily setup containers especially because Oracle XE doesn't have feature parity and refuses to run the migrations. Just fucking use PostgreSQL, or even MariaDB.
Same goes for file formats, it made me quite angry when my university mandated that I use Microsoft Office for writing my bachelor's and master's papers, when LibreOffice is mostly good enough (only caveat was the references tracking being kind of jank, but in large part due to the university having very specific requirements in regards to how the references have to be formatted; personally I'd just prefer thesis.md/LaTeX/whatever but I guess we can't have everything). Same for Windows on pretty much all the computers. My country is already poor as shit, we might as well just acknowledge that and stop overpaying for literally everything to greedy orgs. They didn't even buy local and use something like OnlyOffice or paid someone that provides managed Nextcloud hosting or whatever.
Hopefully they can throw a couple of bucks at the foss things underpinning the internet.
They do, and have been for a while now.
https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/
https://nlnet.nl/project/ currently listing 1566 foss projects that have received financial support
Very weird to see written "EU open-source sector", because any medium or large open-source project is international and includes many EU contributors.
I don't think of GNU as an "US" open-source project, nor of Linux as a "Finnish" open-source project. That's just laughable.
Here is what I submitted:
I am a well known FOSS developer.
At one point code I had written protected half the passwords on the entire Internet, and today around a quarter of all HTTP(S) traffic on the internet goes through software I have written ("Varnish").
That, and the fata morgana of retirement shimmering on my horizon, makes it my considered opinion that FOSS is the gift EU does not deserve, and runs a great risk of destroying on first contact.
However, closed source as we know it, is not compatible with an open, free and fair society, so I am more than aboard with the EU's long overdue recognition of FOSS as the way forward and out of the grubby, greedy claws of "Big Tech" and their endless enshitification of our lives.
The kind of FOSS software relevant to this discussion is usually rock steady and dependable in ways much commercial closed software, precisely because of the secrecy, can never be or become.
But the human communities which produces the FOSS software are fragile, fractious, and as a general rule, composed of people who may be great programmers, but who have absolutely no experience, and no interest, in fostering and stewarding stable human communities.
This is literally why there are who knows how many, different "distributions" of the Linux operating system, "window managers", "web-site frameworks" and programming languages.
Therefore the absolutely most important thing for EU to understand about FOSS, is that it probably is as close to the "ideal market", in the sense of economic theories, as anything will ever come: It literally costs nothing to become a competitor.
But that also means that if the EU member countries were to pick, no matter how fair and competently, a set of FOSS software to standardize on, and pour money into the people behind it, to provide the necessary resources to support and sustain the need for IT systems, for all the administrations in the EU countries, that software would instantly stop being FOSS - no matter what words the license might contain, because it would no longer be part of the market.
In other words: EU cannot "switch to FOSS", it would no longer be FOSS if EU did.
At the most fundamental level, the EU has three options:
1. Pick and bless a set of winners, consisting of:
a) Operating system, portable to any reasonable computer architecture. b) Text-processing, suitable for tasks up to a book. c) Spreadsheet d) Email client. e) Web Browser f) Accounting software, suitable for small organizations.
and fund organizations to maintain, develop and support the software for the future as open source, turning that software into infrastructure like water, power and electricity, free for all, individuals, startups and established companies alike, to use and benefit from.
2. Continuously develop/pick, bless and meticulously enforce open standards of interoperability, and then "let the competition loose".
3. Both. By providing a free baseline and de-facto reference implementations for the open standards, "the market" will be free to innovate, improve and compete, but cannot (re)create walled gardens.
To everybody, me included, option two seems the ideologically "pure" choice, because we have all been brought to believe that "governments should not pick winners".
But governments have always picked winners. Today all of EU has 230VAC electrical grids, because EU picked that as a winner, thereby leveling the market to everybody's benefit.
Therefore I will argue, that the wise choice for EU is option three.
First, it will be incredibly cheap, as in just tens of millions of Euro per year, to provide all EU citizens with a free and trustworthy software platform to run on their computers.
Second, it can be done incredibly fast: From EU makes the decision, the first version can be release in a matter of months, if not weeks.
Third, it will guarantee interoperability of data.
Sincerely,
Poul-Henning Kamp
"It literally costs nothing to become a competitor"
but
"The new strategy will address the economic and political importance of open source, as a crucial contribution to a strategic framework for EU technological sovereignty, competitiveness and cybersecurity." (as per the call document)
This means OSS, but with an ecosystem that does NOT rely on anything non-EU for development, maintenance and distribution. This brings the price from "literally costs nothing" to hundreds of millions Euro.
Evidence of what? Of the existence of open source? Of "open source" what? Software? Hardware? Its usage? The the communities behind various open source projects?
All the European Commission is interested in is getting software cheaper or for free.
If they were truly interested in freeing themselves from non-EU software, thereby preventing potential interference from (mostly) the US, they wouldn’t have chosen the path of soften the GDPR - that move mainly made the big tech happier.
And don’t even get me started with Chat Control.
Not quite. Harshness of regulations like GDPR is perhaps the primary reason why European tech entrepreneurs overwhelmingly choose to emigrate to the US when given choice.
> Harshness of regulations like GDPR is perhaps the primary reason why European tech entrepreneurs choose to emigrate to the US when given choice.
What are those harshnesses?
70 propositions from the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud, written in part by yours truly (in early 2025, i.e. before the "Trump effect" was in full force) and published by the Commission in July 2025:
https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/11798...
The document is also known as "The “Open Source Way to EU Digital Sovereignty & Competitiveness” thematic roadmap".
Earlier discussion (in French): https://linuxfr.org/news/la-commission-europeenne-publie-une...
---
Here is the complete list of proposals from the roadmap, translated into English and organised by pillar.
### Pillar 1: Technological Development
- Define technical specifications as open standards for European Open Source cloud, edge and IoT environments.
- Fund interoperability pilot projects that prioritise the use of European Open Source technologies.
- Require all EU-funded digital infrastructure projects to adhere to these interoperability standards.
- Promote and enforce the implementation of open standards throughout the EU.
- Create a ‘European Open Source Sovereignty Fund’ (EOSSF) dedicated to essential projects. [NB: this would now be called the EU-STF].
- Offer targeted grants for the security, maintenance and strengthening of the sovereignty of Open Source projects.
- Foster in-depth collaboration with European academic institutions and Open Source Programme Offices (OSPOs).
- Develop a practical guide for public procurement managers to evaluate European Open Source solutions.
- Create sector-specific reference architectures based on European Open Source technologies.
- Launch large-scale demonstration projects to illustrate the practical benefits of European Open Source solutions.
- Produce and distribute comprehensive ‘playbooks’ for the deployment of European Open Source solutions.
- Implement policies to actively encourage the adoption of these reference implementations in public procurement.
### Pillar 2: Skills Development
- Organise industry-focused training workshops with a European emphasis on Open Source tools and platforms.
- Offer targeted training grants to SMEs and public sector organisations for European Open Source skills development.
- Launch certification programmes for mastery of European Open Source technologies and standards.
- Establish EU-funded retraining programmes to help professionals transition into European Open Source roles.
- Collaborate with industry partners to create hands-on learning and placement opportunities in Open Source.
- Offer financial incentives to companies that participate in retraining programmes and use European Open Source.
- Develop a European Open Source resource platform that brings together training materials, best practices, and case studies.
- Integrate European Open Source principles into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curricula from secondary school to university.
- Support the creation of European Open Source ‘centres of excellence’ in universities.
- Develop EU-wide coding competitions and hackathons focused on European Open Source solutions.
- Introduce training on European Open Source business models into vocational training.
- Create vocational training modules for European Open Source project management.
- Establish certification for mastery of European Open Source business skills.
### Pillar 3: Public Procurement Practices
- Launch a consultation with public sector bodies and Open Source providers to identify challenges related to public procurement.
- Make ‘Public Money, Public Code, Open Source First, European Preference’ policies mandatory in public procurement.
- Develop comprehensive guidelines for public procurement to evaluate and select European Open Source solutions.
- Fund demonstration projects showing the success of replacing proprietary systems with European Open Source.
- Establish clear criteria for defining what constitutes a ‘European’ Open Source solution.
- Provide a practical guide for public procurement managers to evaluate Open Source solutions.
- Collaborate with industry and standardisation bodies to develop accessible evaluation criteria for Open Source.
- Create a public directory of recommended European Open Source solutions.
- Encourage public sector organisations to adopt solutions developed under the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.
- Launch cross-border pre-commercial procurement (PCP) projects focused on European Open Source.
- Create knowledge-sharing platforms for feedback on PCP initiatives and Open Source best practices.
- Actively involve European Open Source providers in the co-design of solutions in the PCP process.
- Publish guidelines to help public sector organisations manage and support European Open Source.
- Promote the active participation of public sector representatives in European Open Source communities.
- Support training programmes for public sector staff on project management and Open Source compliance.
- Engage stakeholders to collaboratively refine and simplify procurement practices for Open Source.
### Pillar 4: Growth and Investment
- Create a European Open Source Investment Platform (EOSIP) to centralise information on funding.
- Organise information workshops for European SMEs and start-ups on how to obtain investment.
- Establish partnerships with private investors to form a network of venture capital funds focused on European Open Source.
- Expand the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative with a focus on Open Source cloud, edge and IoT.
- Regularly assess the impact of funding programmes on community growth and market adoption.
- Allocate dedicated funding to high-impact European Open Source projects that meet strategic needs.
- Develop co-investment models that combine public funds with European private sector investments.
- Launch accelerators and incubators specifically designed for European Open Source technologies.
- Develop an EU-wide branding strategy to highlight the quality and sovereignty of European Open Source.
- Showcase European Open Source successes on international platforms through marketing campaigns.
- Form strategic partnerships with European industry organisations to increase project visibility.
- Establish public-private R&D consortia on European Open Source for high-priority projects.
- Offer incentives for private sector contributions to critical European Open Source initiatives.
- Develop platforms for knowledge exchange and cross-sector collaboration within the European ecosystem.
### Pillar 5: Governance
- Conduct vulnerability assessments for critical European Open Source projects.
- Collaborate with European cybersecurity agencies to develop threat models for Open Source environments.
- Publish findings and best practices from security assessments to the European ecosystem.
- Offer tailored compliance advice to help European Open Source projects navigate EU regulations.
- Facilitate accessibility to Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) certification for European Open Source projects.
- Provide resources and support for the documentation and auditing of European projects.
- Ensure stable, long-term funding for core European Open Source infrastructure.
- Establish mentoring programmes focused on developing European talent for critical projects.
- Create a European Open Source Advisory Board to oversee project funding and direction.
- Require EU-supported European projects to adhere to transparent governance and accountability practices.
- Support European community involvement in Open Source project governance.
- Facilitate community input into European Open Source policy development.
- Publish guidelines on best practices for managing the lifecycle of European Open Source projects.
- Provide resources for responsible maintenance and end-of-life support for European projects.
- Encourage comprehensive documentation and knowledge sharing within the European ecosystem.
One more step in the right direction, good
[flagged]
It's some utopian dream to think the death of the EU would decentralize power. It's currently a necessary evil to put pressure on the already centralized power of the US global hegemony. Without the EU, the world is controlled by the US and China.
> It's currently a necessary evil to put pressure on the already centralized power of the US global hegemony.
How can I opt out of this "necessary evil"?
I don't want to be part of this feud between powers as I don't want the EU to be a world power since in all world powers 90% of the wealth just concentrates to the top 1% anyway, so becoming one would not benefit me. Will housing be more affordable once we become a "world power"? Or fix healthcare shortages?
Like for example, the public transport and healthcare where I live have been going to shit past 10 years plus housing become unaffordable. Those issues are not China's fault, Trump's fault and not Putin's fault no matter how much they try to gaslight us otherwise. Putin and Trump didn't come here and inflate our currency creating speculative bubbles that popped, our own politicians did.
So no, it's not a "necessary evil", it's a manufactured one via FUD and scaremongering, to deflect blame and responsibility for failures of local politicians and copot public option in the direction the 1% financieres desire since their kids won't be on the frontline of this new world war they're trying to stir up, we'll all be just casualties and I don't want to be one.
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The EU is perhaps the most decentralized large power in the world and is held to an astronomically higher standard than any other such power.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551972
Do you understand which players want to take away power from the EU and “decentralize” power or better, create division?
To me this is the most amazing thing people that would turn themselves inside out against communism/socialism because of the lies they have been told. When it actually comes down to it are all for communism ie open source
Open source is not communism. Communism would entail that we collectively own Linux, which we don't. It's private property, and if we want to use the code, we need to abide by its licensing terms. Licensing terms that are built upon the existence of copyright, a concept that allows for private ownership of intellectual property.
The licensing terms exist as a patch on copyright. If copyright law were fixed, we wouldn't need those terms at all.
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This is so reductive. Open source has nothing to do with communism.
As a socialist, I would disagree.
Communism is about a would-be utopia after the workers own the means of production.
For us tech workers, it could be argued that the means of production are source code. Thus, there is a socialist aspect to open source - but that's a good thing!
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Just because it's free? Let's talk again when all open source projects are funded and controlled by the state with zero competition between them and no consumer choice. Only one Linux distro, only one database, only one web framework, etc. And it's decided top-down from the state what to work on. I doubt though that these projects would have started in the first place in a communist setting.
There is no reason such a state would have to set things up this way.
As an example: you probably know that germany has socialized healthcare. It is, however, not implemented as a single-payer model. Instead there are tons of different insurances competing with each other, while having a highly regulated floor of what they MUST offer.
Is the model perfect? Hell no, it has tons of issues - though overall it's pretty solid. My point is just that social policies and "no internal competition ever" does absolutely not have to go hand in hand. There is a massive middle ground.
See: social democracy as a concept and in its current implementation.
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"The" state, with no competition, like there's only one state?
Belgium isn't big enough to realistically have its own linux, but France and Germany are.
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Yours and others knee jerk reaction proves my point you are conflating autocracy with communism/socialism.
This is as usual confused. People keep discussing communism as if they were (via analogy) talking about capitalism being about men in suites with fake smiles, green paper, bank vaults, and powerpoint presentations. Every time people have to respond with paragraphs upon paragraphs just unrolling all that nonsense.
Try to update your knowledge on the subject instead of talking like an alien in Trafalgar Square.
Open source = communism is the dumbest take I've read on HN lmao
I would argue open source is decentralization and proprietary is centralization.
In other words, open source is libertarianism and proprietary is communism.
And this move is to move from Big Tech/"Big State" to smaller alternatives.
> proprietary is communism.
Maybe we should not twist ourselves to logical pretzels to redefine terms like that.
Politics should never drive technical decisions unless the people involved actually understand the technology. When policy is made without that expertise, open source becomes a political slogan instead of a sustainable ecosystem.
What the European Commission is doing is the right thing, then.
It is a "call for evidence", not a directive. It can be summarized as: for our software needs, we depend too much on non-EU countries, we heard about this open source thing, will it solve our problem?
They studied the political aspect (dependence on non-EU countries), that's their job. They are now asking experts about the technical aspect.
> Politics should never drive technical decisions
This can never be true. Politics drives all decisions.
National politics may not. But assuming technical decisions are made on an aethereal plane above humanity is just assuming away complexity. It's the excuse of a technical team that developed something superb for no actual user.
I actually think it's a great idea to minimize government dependence on specific vendors at a policy level.
Perhaps these policies shouldn't be too detailed, but signing away future freedom ('nobody ever fired for choosing $entranched_bigcorp') should not be the path of least resistance for decision makers.
Fully agree!
At first your comment reads as negative, but you actually like this "call for evidence" then, as they're explicitly asking for feedback about it? Not sure why it reads so negative when you're actually seemingly agreeing with the submission.
This shows that the people in charge have no idea. If they understood the topic, there would be no need for evidence.
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I don't see how EU can develop a thriving software industry with its love for control and regulation.
I think this was disused a few days ago in a similar HN comment thread. Turns out, the US has way more data-tapping anti-privacy laws than the EU - only that the US more or less secretly adopted them and forbids any company from telling their end-users.
Whereas you hear more about "data regulation-attempts" in the EU because it actually still has very strong privacy-rules and when trying to alter them there is a real public debate and not a hush-hush secret commission that gives security agencies access to all user data without public notification.
Here is the related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509019#46510983
It is pointless trying to explain to corporate company man who just repeat the narrative of their bosses.
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Europe already have a thriving software industry, and in fact is probably the leader when it comes to having the most influential and biggest FOSS projects, since so many of them originate in Europe :)
If I had to chose between "control and regulation and healthy community of FOSS" vs "no control or regulation, and healthy community only for for-profit companies", I know what side I'm choosing.
Maybe the EU can develop its own version of Linux OS, just like North Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS
-- edit
When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.
The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.
With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)
The consultation is great and all but
As someone who has watched on the sidelines how Opensource governance turns projects into hydra monsters (Redhat, Jakarta EE). I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.
But who knows, maybe they will just become end users of a popular distro and other opensource software.
Finland (where Linux comes from) is in the EU. There are also a few European linux distributions you may have heard of: e.g. Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu (UK), Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia, Knoppix, etc.
How is Linux related to Finland? Just because some of early contributors was born in Finland?
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> Ubuntu (UK)
This is an EU initiative, Ubuntu probably isn't included.
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What for? Plenty of maintainers for various distros are from Europe and/or the EU.
For example: https://map.debian.net/
What is this map? Almost every city in DK and Sweden shows "Kåre Olsen"
Is all the distributions where most core developers already live in Europe/EU not enough for you? Take a look at where most of the active contributors live for some distributions, and I think you'd be surprised :)
With my original flippant comment I was trying to highlight that despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators.
When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.
The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.
With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)
The consultation is great and all but I am skeptical, so I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.
Hence my comparison to North Korea's Linux distro
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I don't get it - do you think the US government doesn't have homegrown linux distros?