Comment by rambambram
9 days ago
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.
Yes but we gotta understand that sometimes some things the citizens suggest end up on the law. So we should just continuously fight to keep that happening.
Additionally, the EU and its administration, is a big group of people. There are probably different people or teams pushing for this idea, which all in all, is a very good one, maybe even fellow (ex) open source contributors, and the ChatControl thing, surely comes from other groups with entirely different interests.
Yes. Probably someone in power is getting kickbacks to ignore the public and specialists. Once that hurdle is settled, whatever the way it happens, saner people can re-use previous requests for opinion to guide them on better paths.
Waste some - but not too much - of your energy poking our EU orgs to the right way.
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.