The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.
Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.
While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.
The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.
This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.
What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases.
If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.
Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.
Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon.
As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).
>As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this.
I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies.
The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time.
I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere.
A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.
If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.
Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.
Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.
> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress
Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.
True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.
The current NGI program (“Next Generation Internet“), of which NLNet is a participant of, is part of the Horizon Europe EU level program with a (fixed) runtime from 2021-2027.
The EU could set up something publicly run at first, creating (software) contracts which let chunks of the system get run by small, focused, competitive European businesses who could focus on, say, running a data center in France, providing blob storage services, managed Postgres or whatever...
But the issue with many small corporations is that you can not run office IT like that. People buy from Microsoft because you can get all in one from them. If you do not compete with that, then you aren't competing at all.
That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together.
The EU government can provide that.
That would not only compete with Microsoft it could harness the power of small business/startup competition for the individual components which Microsoft can't do.
Japanese keiretsu are a good model to follow here. It was a network of small businesses each of whom held shares in related companies, centered around a bank that provided financing. It was responsible for Japan's economic miracle.
China also did something quite similar which is why they are absolutely dominant in electronics manufacturing.
The EU government doesn't appear willing to do anything like this though. I think they'd rather just get sweet talked by SAP into funneling taxpayer cash into their coffers.
>An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.
No. There is no vendor for this. Such a vendor would need to offer and support everything that MS is offering and supporting.
>And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.
Integration is hard. It needs to work together. We all know that Linux has some rough edges (and so does Windows) and the vendor has to take care of it all and actually needs to fix it. A company like that has to suddenly do maintenance on many major open source projects.
You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators
who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?
My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on
strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever
had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see
that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time
it's been coming.
It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.
That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances)
is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with
the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a
surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.
I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of
assumptions that the world is moving beyond.
Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us
tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity
is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why
care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate
functional utility.
In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.
50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many
of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one
computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any
reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of
that failure.
I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no
alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the
point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them.
Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.
I don't think administrative work needs any killer applications. You need a complete system which actually works together and can be sourced by a single vendor.
Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.
Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."
Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.
[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.
You're assuming that people want to switch but I'm talking about the incentives for end consumers to switch. There has to be some strong motivation for switching, and it's not only going to be GUI design. Something about a new OS must be really desirable, either the hardware it's running on or better applications.
I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.
I would claim that many people would be fine using something else because they use 30% of the features of the respective applications.
They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!
As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.
They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.
However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.
In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.
I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.
Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.
Actually, the grant process at NLnet is supposed super light weight. It consists of a single short form (https://nlnet.nl/propose) with very little boilerplate. No consultants needed...
Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.
My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.
The application process is pretty easy. I applied a couple of years ago. I did take it seriously, but I probably should have put more time and effort into my message and presentation.
What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.
Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.
Motis (transit calculator), Clearance (OSM contribution analysis) and StreetComplete (OSM contribution gamified) : very important assets for the free mapping community. Good news !
Originally, NLNet was *private money* given by the founders of a dutch ISP¨.
Now that this private money run out, they made a partnership with the European Commission, which is *public money* and comes with more strings attached.
Something I came across yesterday was OpenCloud. I think with many of these small projects being funded it's not clear there's a cohesive vision of how to reclaim the internet. I mean the browser itself is owned by big tech. I don't know whether you have to start again at the protocol level.
Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.
One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.
The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.
Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).
The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.
Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.
While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.
The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.
This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.
I think that is a question of architecture.
What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.
Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases.
If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.
Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?
There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?
Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful.
Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.
Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.
Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon.
As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).
>As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this.
I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies.
The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time.
I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere.
A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.
> A new system vendor needs to be created
If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.
Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.
Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.
> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress
Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.
True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.
> Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress.
Source: "100 things that never happened"
And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.
If it’s government owned/controlled it will be much, much worse than Microsoft (purely from the product quality perspective)
And?
The current NGI program (“Next Generation Internet“), of which NLNet is a participant of, is part of the Horizon Europe EU level program with a (fixed) runtime from 2021-2027.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Europe
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors
Google's Android is the largest OS by usage.
But yes, you're right. When you try to use a non-US OS in France you end up buying US hardware and erasing your data on the next LineageOS release.
We need vendors.
>Google's Android is the largest OS by usage.
I am primarily thinking about government institutions and corporations. There Microsoft is used almost everywhere.
Mobile phones are a secondary issue in my opinion, also because Android is already much more open than Windows.
The EU could set up something publicly run at first, creating (software) contracts which let chunks of the system get run by small, focused, competitive European businesses who could focus on, say, running a data center in France, providing blob storage services, managed Postgres or whatever...
But the issue with many small corporations is that you can not run office IT like that. People buy from Microsoft because you can get all in one from them. If you do not compete with that, then you aren't competing at all.
That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together.
The EU government can provide that.
That would not only compete with Microsoft it could harness the power of small business/startup competition for the individual components which Microsoft can't do.
Japanese keiretsu are a good model to follow here. It was a network of small businesses each of whom held shares in related companies, centered around a bank that provided financing. It was responsible for Japan's economic miracle.
China also did something quite similar which is why they are absolutely dominant in electronics manufacturing.
The EU government doesn't appear willing to do anything like this though. I think they'd rather just get sweet talked by SAP into funneling taxpayer cash into their coffers.
Microsoft's push to the cloud and subscriptions for core stuff... outlook, word, excel, is so bizarre and filled with hubris.
An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.
That's a good step. And a there are vendors supporting Linux.
You can be sure such vendors would firm that up with a government sized buy.
Linux support is flawless, as long as you select supported components. And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.
>An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.
No. There is no vendor for this. Such a vendor would need to offer and support everything that MS is offering and supporting.
>And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.
Integration is hard. It needs to work together. We all know that Linux has some rough edges (and so does Windows) and the vendor has to take care of it all and actually needs to fix it. A company like that has to suddenly do maintenance on many major open source projects.
> No. There is no vendor for this.
You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?
My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.
It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.
>You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?
Because there seems to be no alternative.
> seems to be no alternative
That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.
I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.
Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.
In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.
50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.
I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
I don't particularly care.
This is not a nice to have. It is about European security.
There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them.
Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.
I don't think administrative work needs any killer applications. You need a complete system which actually works together and can be sourced by a single vendor.
Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.
Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."
Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.
[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.
> but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Ah photoshop. Every municipality employee uses photoshop at least 5h a day!
You're assuming that people want to switch but I'm talking about the incentives for end consumers to switch. There has to be some strong motivation for switching, and it's not only going to be GUI design. Something about a new OS must be really desirable, either the hardware it's running on or better applications.
I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.
I would claim that many people would be fine using something else because they use 30% of the features of the respective applications.
They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!
As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.
They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.
However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.
>You're assuming that people want to switch
No, I am not. That is the stance of the EU. Switching is a matter of European security.
What "people" want is already irrelevant and whether the GUI is consistent or not couldn't matter less.
There is also a lot of indirect funding in the form of the governments purchasing habits: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-s...
In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.
I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.
Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.
Actually, the grant process at NLnet is supposed super light weight. It consists of a single short form (https://nlnet.nl/propose) with very little boilerplate. No consultants needed...
Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.
My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.
The application process is pretty easy. I applied a couple of years ago. I did take it seriously, but I probably should have put more time and effort into my message and presentation.
What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.
Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.
Except for the fact that big consultancies who receive most of the government contracts, have zero contribution to the open source ecosystem.
When you pay 1000 USD to Microsoft to use o365, how much of that goes to the developers?
The argument of "but very little of that money will go to *actual* development" is not looking at the alternative being used now.
Motis (transit calculator), Clearance (OSM contribution analysis) and StreetComplete (OSM contribution gamified) : very important assets for the free mapping community. Good news !
NLnet is a great initiative. Among the numerous projects they have supported is Marginalia [1] search engine.
1. https://www.marginalia.nu/
"NLnet is a great initiative"
Originally, NLNet was *private money* given by the founders of a dutch ISP¨.
Now that this private money run out, they made a partnership with the European Commission, which is *public money* and comes with more strings attached.
Mastodon is another one (ActivityPub / Feediverse)
https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon/
Some great initiatives being funded, especially: >PeerTube for Institutions — Make PeerTube easier to manage and moderate at scale
I'd LOVE to see more institutions and NGOs move to PeerTube.
The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary, part of the well funded Wikimedia that spends over a quarter of its budget on "Building analytics and ML services" https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
Something I came across yesterday was OpenCloud. I think with many of these small projects being funded it's not clear there's a cohesive vision of how to reclaim the internet. I mean the browser itself is owned by big tech. I don't know whether you have to start again at the protocol level.
https://opencloud.eu/en
Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.
One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.
The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.
Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).