The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.
Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.
“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.
My guess they recognise they lack visibility: People think there are no alternatives to big tech but other than hardware we’re not that dependent, especially in software. It’s a matter of switching to local or open alternatives which are ready now.
Yet government moves to Linux fall because it’s complicated. It’s not that simple unfortunately.
There needs to be a driving force (eg. Like china pushing it’s os, or maybe this one with captain orange)
Everything is driven by the end user. And unfortunately we are a gray continent so the younger generation must start.
Alternatively I can’t get my wife out of an iPhone because a Samsung is just to confusing.
What I can do in the background I do but it has to be easy and recognizable for 75% of the population.
Those failed Linux moves happened because governments are cheap and defer entire digitisation to municipalities and other local forms of government. It’s like there’s no planning of anything anymore („free market will solve everything”). It sounds ridiculous but even effing North Korea knows better.
If they were serious about it they’d hire couple of dozen open source software contributors first, do a small scale trial run where you iron out the kinks and submit patches where necessary and only then roll this out to regular govt clerks.
You can’t expect projects running on a shoestring budget to provide you with commercial grade solutions. Of course if you hire a big corpo that will promise you everything above but those somehow always turn out to be scams.
They went through the effort of creating their own fork, Limux. It has nothing to do with money (cant find the amount of money invested on the implementation btw) or deferring anything. No need to attach the process there. Yes, i’m sure there were some issues with printers and other stuff but that could be solved by replacement.
The problem was not Limux. The problem were the users as i pointed out. The Gray people and the “touchscreen” people that are stuck on something are going to rebel. As said before, your users need to be able to work with it and like it.
I consulted on multiple implementations and the main thing that matters to people for acceptance is: “is it sexy?”. If its sexy, people will adopt it easier. Linux at that time was generally looking blegh.
Users have to get used to something different, big hurdle. When looking at it, it looks like garbage, no interest.
It all depends on acceptance.
It could be that it would succeed now because the UI has come a long way.
All you say is true but not impossible to solve with adequate funding. I’d argue that Windows and Office is so user hostile these days that the barrier to entry is much lower than usual. Have you tried to save a file in Excel in the last year or so? It’s like Office Guantanamo and people are increasingly fed up