Comment by tomaytotomato
9 days ago
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
> 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.
But despite that, they exist today, successfully so, and continue being funded by the very people you claim they should stay away from.
I'm not sure if you looked into how this whole "funding FOSS" thing works like, but governments are not opening a fund, letting any FOSS developer expense stuff to it and calling it a day. Usually they contract a company to work on things, that then end up FOSS.
Even if the end result is FOSS or not, they have the same people they can blame if they want to, the people they paid for certain results. The license of the finished thing doesn't change who's responsible for doing the job they've been paid to do.
I think until you actually understanding how the funding works, it would be fair to avoid doing flippant comments who basically only try to add some fuel to some fire, with some completely out of place comparison to a NK Linux distribution.
The funding mechanism isn't really the point, its the product that comes after.
Sure, the EU contracts developers to build features they want, but when those requirements start coming from regulatory mandates rather than user needs, you're not just adding features to Ubuntu anymore.
You're forking it into something fundamentally different.
"EUbuntu"? :)
Look at how the EU handles tech regulations:
- GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.
- AI legislation; lets wait and see
- Digital sovereignty; fundamentally trying to gain access control for EU citizens data from Google and Apple.
Anyways, let's see what happens. Maybe I'm being too cynical and they'll just become savvy end-users of existing distros. But given the pattern, I'm not holding my breath.
> - GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.
I was gonna reply to your comment in good faith, but I realize right here that you don't actually understand what you're talking about. Cookie banners have nothing to do with GDPR, at all, and thinking they're somehow connected, grossly misunderstands regulation in the EU. How am I supposed to take anything else you say about these topics with a straight face?
So with that said, I hope you have a continued nice day :)