Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack Europe is famous for having the most tightly regulated non-existent tech sector in the world. This is a mildly unfair characterization, as there are plenty of tech enterprises across the continent, quite a respectable smattering if it wasn't for the US doing everything at least ten times bigger. Quite the problem, sighed the …
Which is why the EU is now eagerly looking to open source as part of digital decolonization. It wants to end dependency on American software and services, not just for a healthier and more influential home sector, but to protect itself from hostile leverage.
But I guess being dependent on Indian consultancies, to the point of actively destroying domestic businesses by hostile policies, it's absolutely fine.
Talk about hypocrisy.
It's a repeat of Weimar Republic. Societies have been shafted by corporations and they see Krasnov as a man who shares their anger. They don't recognise though that he is a Russian asset deployed to destroy the Western world and he is not on their side. They are blinded by hate.
Imagine if Stalin had equivalent of Epstein files on Hitler.
"...a repeat of Weimar Republic. Societies have been shafted by corporations..."
I am a historian and I don't think corporations had a lot to do with what happened during the Weimar Republic.
It's also safe to say that a stable democracy of 250 years is hardly comparable to a post-war, fragile first shot at democracy by a nation with little love for governmental institutions, going through a world wide economic crisis.
But yes the Russians are the source of evil. Again. And they were before.
Whilst I agree the hate mob is large out there, I would say the left wing in US society is more inclined towards Nazi ideals than the right. The sheer amount of bullshit coming out of the US left is staggering...I watched a live stream recently where some left wing lunatic staggered over the question "can a man get pregnant?" for nearly an hour. They only had to answer yes or no...if they answered yes, they'd have been discredited as a scientist and if they said no they would have lost the respect of all their left wing chums in the echo chambers and lost all of their business counselling trans people. These people have no self respect or dignity at all.
All Americans talk about American Exceptionalism whether they're on the right or the left...it's how they're raised...pledging allegiance every day at school etc...is just the way the US is. They are brought up to think the American way is the best and only way. They don't know how backwards they are...I mean most of their towns don't have pavements or any pedestrian infrastructure...they're only a hop skip and a jump away from villages of mud huts out there in terms of infrastructure and civil engineering.
Don't get drawn into the Left vs Right USA USA USA bullshit...there are scumbags on both sides lying through their teeth. I think the most hypocritical wing is the left though...they're jumping in front of ICE cars and agents claiming they're like Nazis...yet under Obama (a left winger) they reached record levels of deportation, he has the highest record of deporting illegals in the last 40 years...Trump isn't even 10% there yet. It would take Trump another 5 years (which he doesn't have) to reach Obama levels of deportation.
The first time you download linux! After that use the old Linux box to download the new ISO for the new box. Personally I have never used w for the download. Old enough that I purchased a CD (I have some old RH and SuSe ones still in the bookcase) to get me started. Prior to that I had some Sun's which thankfully I got the developer discount on. Those puppies were very expensive. I welcomed linux with the cheap commodity hardware, and at least initially, cobbled together systems from components. Laptops I buy now of course include w. I turn it on to make sure it works, then wipe the drive. i live in a utopia of windows free computing.
Ah, Slackware nostalgia... I too remember my first "Slackware Professional Linux for 386 PCs" install. I was lucky enough to get the whole distribution on a PC Plus cover CD (about June 1994, I think?) but I still had to write the boot/root disks to get the installer started. One of the first things I had to do after installing was to compile my own kernel (v1.1.18) because the stock kernel(s) didn't include the driver for the Sound Blaster CD interface (sbpcd). Talk about going in at the deep end. But I was a kid and therefore invincible!
Sounds awfully like my compute universe ... have fully wiped Win off all laptops+desktop. Linux across the board, and a Win VM which is kept offline and fired up only when absolutely needed (twice in 2025, nil thus far in 2026). Next is a mobile device addition running iodeOS or CalyxOS to further distance things.
And ya know what? Devices stable and essentially trouble-free. It is as close to such an achievable 'utopia of Win-free computing' as I am fairly able to manage. Works for me. Has done for some time.
For us here, within the pages of El Reg yes.
But for everyone else, no. Desktops come with Windows, laptops come with Windows or Chrome. If you're a show off you might have a Macbook. And thems the rules.
The people don't really care all that much, if you could have a version of Linux that mostly looked like Windows (Mint is close enough), sounds like Windows (Windows OSS, WOSS) and you dont let them know they're not using Windows most will be fine.
The other small issue with Linux is that although generally it's very very reliable. Sometimes it's not, and when it's not it can be a right little bastard to fix. And I like Linux but I still think it's a PITA to fix. Win XP-7 made Linux a bad bet as tbh I think Windows was pretty good then, it's just that now W11 is such a shitshow that Linux bugs are a minor irritation in comparison. At least you can fix them.
So the concept of a stadardised EU Linux OS doesn't sound like a bad one. I thought Germany had just about done before it with SUSE and that got a bit of traction in education especially but that was 15yr ago or more. Now it's all MS or Chrome. But if they get it good enough and spread it far enough the hardware guys will come,. it's all about the money after all.
Just don't leave the whole thing relying on some chump ediiting one little dependency from his shed in Slovenia.
Trouble is a lot of the OEMs are staunchly anti-consumer...they could easily offer a cut price (sans Windows tax) edition of pretty much any PC or laptop they produce, they just choose not to or try and ship with Ubuntu or something and charge the same Windows tax because you got a preinstalled OS. It's kinda dumb.
The argument I've heard is that they can't offer much of a discount because the OEM licenses don't cost them as much as a retail license...but they sell that license on at or close to the retail price I'm sure.
Back in the XP to Windows 7 era, Linux was a very different beast. The perception of Linux being buggy and difficult to troubleshoot persists, but it's absolutely not the case anymore...especially with atomic distros like Bazzite.
One of my earlier distro choices was Fedora and I fucking hated it, the whole SELinux thing never failed to piss me off and essentially being forced to third party repos just to get a basic package that Fedora refused to include in their own repos...so naturally I approached Bazzite with some skepticism...but you know what...it's really quite nice. If you just need a Linux box to do shit on and you don't want to use it for development etc basically like a consumer oriented piece of kit...it's great.
I have an EliteDesk 800 G5 that I picked up cheap plugged into a 1440p 165hz 19" portable touchscreen display (at 200% scaling) mounted to the edge of my desk and I use it for just movies, TV, Spotify etc...and it's just great...hasn't wobbled once...updates are smooth, I never have to dive into the configs (because it's just a consumption device and light email / comms device).
At present, that's mostly fixable in competition legislation. It's more of a problem as we move away from x86 to platforms that don't have a common, documented pre-boot environment. I suspect, though, one could emerge quite quickly if it became a procurement requirement.
It's also fixable with the clout of buying power combined with a political will or, at the moment, political necessity. All governments have to do to favour FOSS is use it. Many of us do, it really isn't rocket science. If, in using it, they perceive gaps they can offer bounties for fixes.
Governments should be buying PCs with either no OS and installing it themselves or with Linux already loaded. They should also be switching - urgently - to replace any dependency on somebody else's computers run by US corporations because that just exposes them to bullying.
Right now anyone in government in any of the EU countries and the UK is a fool if they're using any such infrastructure to develop and discuss plans for dealing with Trump's Greenland whims. (Sadly there are many such fools around but we can at least hope they've been briefed and will be dragged into compliance.)
That should be a starting point and scarcely less urgent would be to prepare for Trump telling service providers to turn the lights off - they really need to plan for that happening, irrespective of whether a service is rubber-stamped "sovereign" or not. Anyone objecting with the usual "But it doesn't do xyz yadda, yadda yadda" would have to be told to bring solutions, not problems and that if they couldn't they'd be replaced by someone who could. A response of "LibreOffice isn't consistent with Office" etc would need to be corrected "You mean Office isn't consistent with LibreOffice and that's Office's problem".
"All governments have to do to favour FOSS is use it"
In principle, yes. But the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.
If the EU wants to encourage development in their own backyard ; or at least not in Oceania and EastAsia (I mean not in the US or a Russian or Chinese proxy state) they had better fork out some cash.
The EU needs to set the playing field in the EU's favour. Locally hosted, locally coded and locally supported. Set some good rules on accessibility and internationalism and you're probably on a winner. Make it clear that complying with certain regulations is non-negotiable.
If China can get a national distribution of Linux, then so can the EU (supranational). Mandate it for EU institutions. Give 2 to 3 years to comply, no exceptions. Make some open standards surrounding the distribution including init process, FHS standard, File Systems, Windowing environment, etc. If someone comes up with an interoperable version, then it could be used instead or as well.
This gives application developers a stable target ... to target.
Oh, and don't let the standards making body access "industry partners". (Pray they don't come up with IPv6!)
The EU doesn't have to pick favorites, it just has to make standards and show some backbone and stand up for them. With cash incentive, someone is going to bite. Who knows, it might even find a few like minded institutions elsewhere. (Ankara? London? ECJ? World Bank? UN? Ottawa? Canberra? ICRC?)
It's also fixable with the clout of buying power combined with a political will or, at the moment, political necessity. All governments have to do to favour FOSS is use it.
Absolutely this. UKGov has just signed up for £9Bn with MS over the next 5 years.
There’s probably some top-down standardising that could be helpful, but fundamentally they just need to put their money where their mouth is - imagine what £9Bn would do to UK industry spread around the likes of Canonical, Collabora, etc. And then start looking at all those Oracle licenses…
Some departments will be harder than others, but the Gendarme have shown it could be done 15 years ago when all the tooling was less good, and Austria’s Tourism Ministry have shown you can move a small but non-trivial department in a few months.
Of course, the desktop stuff is still not that hard or important. There are long-tails and edge cases of Windows dependency, but lots of people could shift quickly.
The thornier problem is infrastructure tied up in the MS/Google ecosystem - AD/Entra, identity, email, file sharing and sync, sharepoint, etc, etc.
You can hand someone a Linux laptop tomorrow and tell them to use Libreoffice, and that’s a start - but it’s probably still connecting to an AD domain and leveraging all the M365 backend services - which MS can just turn off if the Tango Prince decides to sanction you (as he did to members of the ICJ). At which point you’re left with anything cached in your laptop and not much else (and possibly not even that if you don’t know you’ve been sanctioned and don’t have a chance to disable the domain connection, at which point it may just nerf your data the next time you fire it up).
The EU should be using open source desktops as should the various EU countrie's governments and they shoild be mandating the schools teaching using these tools.
By using the tools I mean that all documents published by and submitted to the governments would be whatever the defined open standard is. Companies and individuals would soon adapt if they wanted to comunicate.
Everything else would follow on after some initial chaos and 10 years later everone would wonder what the fuss was about.
So agree !!!
The real problem that is more urgent is in your words but may be missed !!!
Namely that the US of A is now ruled by a 'thin skinned over sensitive man baby' who could switch off all the US based systems that the world is 100% dependant on.
Herr Trump will use ANY power he has to get his way ... he has used economic (Tariffs), Military (Change of regime in Venezuela) ... the only one left is Technological (Block/restrict access to Global Technology Vendors/Providers) !!!
The last one is so easy to do and will push countries into the chaos in days as all commerce is impacted.
This is a REAL THREAT ... the No. 1 threat that is more deadly than NATO/OTAN disappearing.
NATO/OTAN without the US of A is doable although very difficult ... Global systems closing down would impact everyone without a single bullet or bomb being used !!!
Herr Trump is a bigger threat than Putin ... more & more the mad bad ideas that Herr Trump is a Russian asset look more possible OR Herr Trump is just mentally unstable !!!
:)
..and beyond that, we (in Europe) don't have the social media platforms and media control that our US-based tech bros (and occasional tech sis) possess and actively use to influence the ignorant and gullible, who also have a ballot.
I can see deliberate electoral carnage further breaking down the power of the European Bloc for whatever Musky end game they have in mind, that coming before meaningful counter-monopoly regulation has a chance to be approved...
Are you nuts? Think of the poor companies providing ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence), they'll go bust.
For those of you that didn't have the pleasure of having ECDL forced on you by your employer, the course basically consist of: how to turn a Windows computer on and off, how to create/edit/modify a text document in Microsoft Office Word and a spreadsheet in Microsoft Office Excel. Of course, the exam is done in Google Chrome.
Oh, the joys of FOSS in EU!
I wouldn't sneer at the ECDL. It was very useful for many people that hadn't had any exposure to using a business type computer. I agree the simplistic on/off stuff can be dropped now (was useful then) but the basics around how to use a word processor, how to save and retrieve a file, simple spreadsheet use. That's all still relevant.
There has been a push to say that "everyone is digital native now", it's total bollox but was wheeled out to justify cutting training budgets. Lots of people even young 'uns know ahow to use a phone but aren't always knowledgable about office type tasks on a PC/laptop
I'd humbly suggest that an ECDL type course focussed on using FOSS would be a fine thing to have around.
Problem is that any EU involvement is a double-edged sword - it's absolutely true that the EU has the ability to create the right environment for the evolution of an EU-wide "EUnux" ecosystem with open-source equivalents of Desktop, Office, and Exchange, then hopefully leading to a stable platform with long-term support that other vendors can start to buy into. It's also true that in such regards, the EU operates at a glacial pace, as there are too many fingers in the pie.
It would take years for any proposal to be agreed and longer for any standards to be put in place. There would be geopolitical arguments over which countries had the most input and control over development, you'd then get interference from law enforcement trying to build in backdoors and privacy activists wanting the exact opposite to bog everything down, and then forks for different versions to end up exactly where you started but with one more Linux to add to all the existing Linuxes. (There's an XKCD on "standards" knocking around about exactly this)
The dream is good, but I think the reality is a world apart
Fortunately, the EU doesn't necessarily have to do those things.
It can start with some general principles in the public sphere, such as mandating a genuine preference for open source software in the evaluation of tenders and introducing a licensing system for cloud computing that would require the ability to operate independently of foreign infrastructure within a designated territory and provide mechanisms for providers to be under effective local control in the event of an emergency.
It wouldn't require (at this stage) any investment of anything, but it would transform the market overnight.
I can't see how you can "mandate a preference" - it's either mandatory or it's subjective. Foreign infrastructure is irrelevant - the US CLOUD Act operates regardless of where any infrastructure is located, therefore control is already in someone else's hands.
"General principles" are not going to transform anything - see Greenland as an example...
abend0c4's idea of including things in tenders sounds like a good idea. Now many government and government linked organisations are required to not only opening it projects for tenders but to go with the lowest bidder. That system gets exploited by underquoting and later overcharging for design changes. Bonus points for making an offer that will require many design changes to actually make things work.
One could include a few simple requirements like:
* Provide a mechanism to be resilient to international tensions or crysis or the company making or hosting the application to go bankrupt
* Provide a mechanism to be easily maintainable by teams other then teams from the company who makes the application
* Provide a mechanism to be easily ported to another platform in the future, even by teams other then teams from the company who makes the application
* Provide a mechanism to be easily extended or adapted on a later time, even by teams other then teams from the company who makes the application
* Provide a mechanism to control cost and deadline overruns and a clear compensation and remediation scheme in case it gets overrun
It doesn't even need to be mandated or overregulated. Companies that still want to make an offer the old way still can, but the organisation making the tender can chose to not go by the cheapest option that they know will likely fail or go far over budget or deadline or will be unmaintanable in the future. To make this selection process "fair enough", one could include the requirement of the organization to include weights used by the selection team. Think of cost 20 points, functionality 20 points, resilience 10 points, maintanability 10 points... and the selection team having to quote the different parts like evaluating an examination. I know the process isn't perfect, but people smarter then me can make it better. I know it would open things up more for legal discussion, but with a good and in advance clear and publicly known evaluation methodology these evaluation procedures can be made quite resilient and reliable.
The problem there is that it would be unlawful (I think) - as it explicitly targets a particular business.
What they did was the right move - mandate "open standards". That would, at the time, have mandated ODF - and forced commercial products to either support it properly or be locked out of gov contracts.
That was such an existential threat to MS that they quite obviously then targeting and subverted the standards setting process. They put forward their "not very open, and definitely not a good standard" formats up to be an ISO standard - and then stuffed national standards bodies (such as our own BSI) with shills to vote it through. Most of these shills turned up to vote it through, then never turned up to another meeting - there were complaints that it was crippling normal business as it often left committees without a quorum and unable to function.
So now, even though it's a rubbish standard, "Office Open XML" (deliberately named to cause confusion ?) is deemed to be an open standard (even though it's not actually fully implementable*) and so ticks the boxes in tender documentation for "supports open standards".
* I recall having a read when it was going through the process - to say it was s**t would be doing turds a disservice. Apart from codifying bugs (Excel date bugs anyone ?), it includes support for BLOBs such as "document in Word 97 format". As Word 97 format is not actually defined in an open standard, i.m.o. that makes the OOXML standard not fully implementable.
It would take years for any proposal to be agreed and longer for any standards to be put in place.
Only because the EU, in pursuit of perfect harmony, seeks to have full consensus and needs to flatten molehills before doing anything. In the face of existential threat those molehills won't be at all important.
The idea that the EU cannot act quickly is a myth; it simply chooses not to, because it doesn't have to, most of the time.
Repeat after me: clever is not the same as useful.
This is the problem Cambridge has faced for decades - yes there are lots of clever people and lots of smart solutions, but none of that makes a great business. And the key here is that providing this stuff to institutions - whether they're European, American, the UK or anywhere else in the world - is a business, not a technical exercise.
The EU can attempt to regulate this into existence, but so long as there are no service providers with call desks, support sites, 24/7 callout, migration tools, consultants for integration and all the other bells and whistles, there is no reason to move away from platforms that have all of those things. Sure, some council or university might have a vague desire to 'decolonise' it's software, but when it comes to signing a purchase order, the usual suspects win every time because they have the salesman who can promise all of the bells and whistles that aren't software (or even hardware).
I'd argue the way to make this stuff happen is to address the impediments to business, not mandate software. If a new tool can be made and sold across the continent, without additional barriers at every border, without regulatory burdens designed for global corporations yet applied to one-man businesses, without complicated tax and reporting requirements that change with each new country, then there is reason to adopt or write software that can be sold. Innovation comes when there is a customer, and for now America provides the single easiest customer base on the planet, with the least state intervention and least punitive financial environment, so that's where innovation goes.
And the same applies to the UK, that *still* fails to address the business environment that would allow local innovation to flourish.
Open source is a tool, not a end goal in it's own right. We want people to be able to use those tools to achieve goals, not for the sake of using the right tool.
> FOSS is also mostly immune to EU regulations, which exist to protect citizens from systematic abuse. That possibility barely exists in open source development
That statement is a very close relative to that favoured by the gun lobby. That guns don't kill people.
FOSS is easily (and cheaply) leveraged for evil as well as good. Whether that is using free software for mass spamming, or open source databases of hacked personal data. Not to mention nefarious uses of "network debugging tools" and the most obvious of all: using readily available web server software for phishing scams.
We could also include FOSS being perverted by autocratic regimes to monitor and suppress their citizens
And guns are heavily regulated in every civilised country simply because they can be used for harm as well as sport and possibly self-defence.
If there is something I do not like about closed source software I can:
Years ago Microsoft tried saying open source was used by hackers and criminals. They stopped because they were effectively saying (a certain flavour of) software security professionals thought Linux was overwhelmingly better than Windows.
> The systematic abuse comes from lock in to a monopoly
I disagree. Abuse of software, whether free (as in beer or unencumbered), paid for, self-written or vibe coded is purely determined by how it is used and by whom.
As for the ability to fix bugs or add features in FOSS. That is more of a theoretical situation than a real-world one. Almost nobody except the codes developers have the time, resources, tools or ability to make changes. Especially without inadvertently creating a new bug, or altering critical behaviours. Certainly not your "average" user: who thinks Google is the internet and equates that with WiFi.
I have worked for many large companies whose main driver for what software they use is indemnity. When something goes wrong they have the number of a six-figure executive who will get it fixed NOW - not when an amateur developer can be cajoled into looking at the problem.
> As for the ability to fix bugs or add features in FOSS. That is more of a theoretical situation than a real-world one. Almost nobody except the codes developers have the time, resources, tools or ability to make changes. Especially without inadvertently creating a new bug, or altering critical behaviours. Certainly not your "average" user: who thinks Google is the internet and equates that with WiFi.
As for the ability to change spark plugs[1] or add features to a car, this is more of a theoretical situation than a real-world one, certainly for your "average" driver (followed by insult to the driver).
> Almost nobody except the codes developers
Ah, yes, carefully ignoring two[2] things:
1) If you look at OSS projects, you will see that it is not in the least bit unusual to have lots of contributors - certainly far, far more than the person/people who originally developed it and/or have become the ongoing maintenance team. Because, you see, it *is* possible for *competent* programmers to hunt down bugs and add new features - and then run regression tests! Note the word "competent". You can always find a total numpty and point to them as your example, the same as we can find someone who just poured a litre of oil into the hole left behind when they removed the spark plug; and we'll find out soon enough for both of those "fixers" and avoid them in the future.
2) The post you are replying to included the subtle line "Hire any competent programmer to fix it for me". Yes, you can actually hire programmers. Just like you can hire a garage to change the spark plugs. Now, is it as easy, at the moment, to find a decent "software garage"? Probably not. Even for institutions in the EU, like councils, right now they'll probably be idiots and approach Capita.
Oooh, look, there is something that the EU could look at: making it easiert to find and hire competent programmers to fix open source! Nope, I don't claim to have *THE* answer to that right now.
> I have worked for many large companies whose main driver for what software they use is indemnity
Hmm, careful there, indemnity is not the same as getting it fixed. You *may* be indemnified with nothing more than a fix, but that is a corner case.
> not when an amateur developer can be cajoled into looking at the problem.
Again, hire somebody.
A lot of that is attitude - both preparedness and getting away from the ever-encroaching "gotta sue" mindset (refer you back to indemnity). When something breaks on a machine, you either have a service level agreement or you have the phone number of a mechanic. If you are such a large company that you (believe you) can call a "six-figure executive" and you NEED to do that then you have already failed at setting up your own systems (including choosing and keeping on top of your service suppliers). Which takes us down another rabbit hole.
I find the whole "it is all a bunch of amteurs" argument really odd when there is so much noise (which you, yes, you Pete 2, are quite capable of seeing if you read the open source articles, and comments, in Same Fine Organ you are reading today) about "oh, open source is all dominated by contributions from the Big Companies, so little is done by amateurs now". But never mind, just stick with whichever claim fits your beliefs.
[1] yes, I *know* that *you* can change spark plugs, but remember that, just as with coding, most of the people reading this forum are in a privileged position. The "average", most particularly the modal average, person these days would not go near a spark plug. I'd be willing to bet that they don't try to change their car's bulbs either (I've stopped trying to change the bulbs - first because I'm gettng on a bit and my hands are not up to the job but, more importantly, because despite the fact that the vehicles have been getting bigger and bigger the access to the bulbs has been getting trickier and more painful wirh every model)
[2] three, if we count the lack of an apostrophe
"Abuse of software, whether free (as in beer or unencumbered), paid for, self-written or vibe coded is purely determined by how it is used and by whom."
In terms of abuse by the origin of the software is irrelevance. However as soon as you compare origins of S/W there is a new scope for abuse, that of the user. As we're talking about abuse of S/W depending on its origin which do you think is the relevant type of abuse?
"I have worked for many large companies whose main driver for what software they use is indemnity." Do you get indemnity against force majeure? That would be the defence if you were to claim for data being abstracted on the instructions of the vendor's government or a service being cut off on the same basis? You're not going to gain indemnity against that, you're going to have to avoid it and that's what you achieve with FOSS*.
If you're in a situation where you're in, say, a government department and there is now a strategy of achieving sovereignty over the govt's IT operations what would happen if you say you can't do that because there are no options where you can't get indemnity? You would be told to go away and come back with solutions, not problems or replaced by someone who could.
* If you wanted, given that source code is available, if there's a problem with the FOSS option, you could still find a six-figure executive who would pay a professional developer to fix it for you. You may not have been following things back closely but there are companies who will give you support contracts for FOSS - what you describe is their exact business.
> When something goes wrong they have the number of a six-figure executive who will get it fixed NOW
Do tell - how many bugs did they get fixed NOW in MS Word by calling a sx-figure executive? Excel? Oracle? Windows? Photoshop? AutoCAD? SOLIDWORKS? SalesForce? Sage? Jira?
Are those all bug-free? Or did you just shrug and work around them?
When something goes wrong they have the number of a six-figure executive who will get it fixed NOW
You and I live in different universes it would seem. My experience of enterprise software is that faults can persist for donkey's years, and the customers are already locked in. Nobody is going to spend 200m anythings to swap their ERP to another vendor, just because one bug doesn't get fixed. And my experience (albeit well dated) is that code changes don't happen instantly, no matter that some "six-figure executive" gets a call from a customer. There's all this stuff, you know, like actually working out what the problem is, what triggers it, what its dependencies are, then designing a fix, implementing and testing, then rolling from development to production...at which point any competent customer will do their own testing, decide a deployment schedule etc etc.
By all means deplore the evil that men do with a copy of {Microslop|Libre} Office and how it can be the same.
However, apart from pointing out that one can be bad more cheaply ... you are in a different conversation.
Set pole = evil
Set accomplice = Microsoft
Let your business be doing pole;
Let your business method require Accomplice Office
Now solve for pole = good and for Accomplice = all the rest of us
Different results.
When something goes wrong they have the number of a six-figure executive who will get it fixed NOW
No, they don't. They might think they do, but in reality they have the phone number of a phone support desk who will follow their "executive called us" script.
"Account managers" in these extremely large companies aren't there to get anything fixed. Their job is to make soothing sounds and placate the angry executive who called them. At best they'll escalate to the appropriate product management team, who will add it to their pile.
Why? Because they know that the customer cannot leave.
FOSS suppliers know that the customer can leave relatively easily - moving a LAMP stack between webhosts is trivial, basically only limited by data transfer rates and contractual terms - they care, because they have to.
And as for indemnity:
Fujitsu provided software they knew was unfit for purpose, and appear to have conspired with their customer to divert the blame onto hundreds of postmasters so effectively that many were wrongly fined and even imprisoned. If there was any actual indemnity then Fujitsu would be paying a significant part of the compensation costs - yet they've paid exactly zero.
If Paula Vennells is eventually prosecuted for her part in this miscarriage of justice, do you think any Fujitsu executives will ride to her rescue? Or will they merely phone it in if ordered by the court?
When FOSS didn't exist, there were far more companies competing for users disks space and CPU cycles.
Now but MS, there is only one operating system, and many even advocate Windows must disappear and only Linux should exist - a complete monopoly basically owned by those who pay Torvalds and a few others - guess who?
We need more competition to eliminate monopolies. FOSS doesn't foster competition, it creates monopolies - and reduces freedom of choice. Sure, you get some free breadcrumbs, in exchange for your soul.
FOSS is not Salvator Mundi, is exactly the opposite. Stil people have been bainwashed to have a religious blind faith in it, despite IT world becoming a monopoly of a few companies with total control over it.
> FOSS is easily (and cheaply) leveraged for evil as well as good. Whether that is using free software for mass spamming, or open source databases of hacked personal data. Not to mention nefarious uses of "network debugging tools" and the most obvious of all: using readily available web server software for phishing scams.
Grab the wrong end of the stick and beat around the bush with it.
The protections from systematic abuse are all about preventing the abuse/misuse being part of the functionality built into the software in the first place - and not being removeable because we can't rebuild the software.
Saying that a plank of wood can be used for good or evil is an obvious triviality: hitting someone over the head or laying it down as a bridge, neither of those things is built into the plank. And because a plank is open to inspection we can safely say that, yes, it *can* be used as a gangway from the roof of the flooded building to the dinghy without it necessarily also hitting in the head everyone who stands on it.
Similarly, saying WireShark can be used to fix a LAN problem or to steal traffic is an obvious triviality.
Now, if we had a closed-source WireShark-alike which *also* shipped all the traffic it saw to a third- or fourth-party server in another legal jurisdiction "so we can improve your customer experience" *that* is when you need to be concerned about abuse.
Or, more obviously, as WireShark is not something even known about by a large percentage of computer users, an editor (word processor) or even always-on sections of an operating system that is grabbing all your data...
FLOSS doesn't ensure that all bugs are fixed, all desired features are added, because however many eyes there are, if none of them are looking that way, a solution is not certain.
What FLOSS does ensure is that nobody can _prevent_ a bug being fixed or a feature being added - or disabled, because eyes directed* that way can see.
Proprietary licences and closed code can prevent fixes, and conceal faults.
Consider for a moment Fujitsu and the Post Office, if you are seeking evil (consequences at least).
* And governments do have ways to attract €¥€s
This is not true if you've been keeping your eye on this subject. E.g. from last October:
Good News! Austrian Ministry Kicks Out Microsoft in Favor of Nextcloud
The article also mentions three other recent migrations in Germany, Denmark, and Austria.
Here in the UK it is mandated that Government documents are in the ODF "format", yet we still get documents published either in Microsoft Word or Excel format for download.
(https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/sharing-or-collaborating-with-government-documents)
Same for other UK based organisations linked to the government.
There is no will to move from Microsoft or other US based software, and here in the UK, the Microsoft monopoly position is accepted.
The current events (as of 18/01/2026 etc.) and the need for Microsoft et al to recoup losses due to AI problems, may focus the minds of governments a lot more.
Yet, all i ever see is appeasement from the UK side, with notable exceptions from the Liberal Democrats.
You do need to be a bit of an enthusiast for open source, as even tech savvy people ask if Linux can run Windows software (perfectly), or that Linux software is not that great, or even questioning why you would run Linux as if it is a stupid thing to do (probably based on prejudice or misconception).
Moving to open source will be an uphill struggle, and i would expect that the current issues will have abated by the time the EU is determined to initiate that migration.
You are mostly right. However, I think the antics of the orange one might be helping to focus the minds of even the UK government!
If our core, strongest allies can no longer be trusted then even the UK will need to start serious consideration of building multiple options into big procurements.
The UK government has recently signed multi-billion deals with US companies.
The US has stated it will take a percentage of the revenue of sales of goods to China.
It may be happening out of sight, but somehow, the UK government seems to be very "compliant" with regards to the US behaviour, although it may say "stuff" to the contrary.
I understand that Microsoft is embedded in many UK councils, and if the US decides to levy taxes on Microsoft sales to other countries including the UK, then we are stuffed.
If the UK government keeps on mentioning the "special relationship", then it seems that it is just kicking the can down the road, hoping it will all end in some way or another.
So i personally don't expect the UK government to be frantically paddling under water as it has always been strategically, defunct.
> I understand that Microsoft is embedded in many UK councils
If only there was some way that the Man On Clapham Omnibus - or even the Person On The Register Forums - was able to express their issues to councils and other parts of the government.
Damn this total lack of public access to our parish, town and city councils.
Curse our total inability to contact other concerned citizens.
It may be happening out of sight, but somehow, the UK government seems to be very "compliant" with regards to the US behaviour, although it may say "stuff" to the contrary.
Churchill said you could trust the Americans to do the right thing when they've tried everything else. The same is probably true of the UK government and the time may well be near when that becomes inevitable.
As a government employee I don't share your optimism, Dr Syntax.
Whereas several EU governments have recognised the data (and systems) sovereignty issue and its urgency, the British government have not. Try searching for the term on GOV.UK, and whilst there's a few hits, what they link to has no substance in relation to the actual concept.
It isn't will.
It is people provided with a program, which on inspection turns out to be Word.
They've no idea what format they are saving in.
A claimed advantage fo4 the MS stuff is that a single policy setting can change, for instance, the format a program saves in by default, is it not? Odd that doesn't work.
There were some issues with the LiMux project from the outset. The project ought perhaps to have gone with one of the standard big three distributions (Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat) in the first place rather than do a customised version that might have required more maintenance and they should have adopted LibreOffice as the standard office suite from the outset.
That said, the reversal back to Windows was primarily a political decision rather than a technical one.
For the past 30 years I have done my utmost to pivot away from these huge tech titans and the power they old.
Every singly time I have been frustrated by beancounters who have put profit above all else.
Well now they can live with the consequences. Because I have the receipts. Decades of strategy analysis permanently highlighting the risks of US hegemony.
What bits of the PATRIOT and CLOUD act were ambiguous ?
That said, I will charge my 30 pieces of silver to de-US your system as best can be done.
1) EU regulation don't hit SME and startups harder. IT regulations have exemptions for small companies - but GDPR - but is your business is based on hoarding data, you should try to write useful software, not an ad slinger. Mr. Draghi is acting like a lobbyist for some interests group that believes they can make money like in the US neutering citizens' rights protection.
2) The real problem is the lack of VC capital - if VC thinks they can make money just by hoarding data, or exploiting gig workers, well, they will find EU is not friendly. But tha'ts not the software EU needs to gain its own sovereignity.
3) FOSS is the foundation of the actual Internet olygopoly. No way Google, Facebook, Amazon and the few others could have grown so much and make those profits without FOSS. If they had to pay for all that software, or develop it internally entirely, they would not have grown so much. That's why they back Linux so happily. In exchange, IT has been "enshitttified" and the clock turned back thirty years at least.
4) As a corollary of point 3), FOSS destroyed competition. Today very few, if any, company can grow selling software. Most startups are just bought by one of the Internet molochs as soon as their software becomes a menace to their olygopoly.
5) Linux desktop refuses to become a viable alternative to Windows because, there's "too much heaven in their minds". As long as you run an application in a browser, sure. As soon as you need a native desktop application Linux is a minefield of APIs and ugly GUIs. And WINE is not the solution but for the simplest applications that doesn't need a tight integration with Windows - ab we are to the next point:
6) Linux still lacks anything close to Active Directoy. Google/Facebook/Amazon are not interested in it, so there's nothing alike.
7) Often, high-end hardware is not supported under Linux - drivers are only for MacOS or Windows. And as long as FOSS is a religion about some kind of "freedom" and the like, many drivers won't be available. Never. Companies won't give IP away, forget it. Most FOSS heavy users do the same. Google, Facebook, Amazon, ect. don't give their IP away, they keep in well protected in their own datacenter. They reap FOSS benefits, and gives some breadcrumbs back.
8) For this reason, EU would be utterly stupid to invest heavily in FOSS and give the IP away. US molochs and China wil benefit from them, the first will even increase their profits and their size, the latter will get what it can't still develop internally. EU needs its own software industry - and if that's a commercial one the better. If the product are good, and extra-EU companies want them, they'll have to pay. And companies can grow, without being bought from the usual ones.
"For this reason, EU would be utterly stupid to invest heavily in FOSS and give the IP away."
They don't need to invest heavily. They need to use it. There's stacks there with the IP already given away - not given away to the US or China but to the world. Only if there are some specific things they need to address would they need to invest - lightly - in developing then, yes, they give away the IP because that's you it works, it's how that bonanza of FOSS exists in the first place.
This way you are still in the hands of those who develop it. If they take it away, and you're unable to create anything similar, where do you want to go?
FOSS is a way for the Internet molochs to kill competittion - so nobody can grow enough to challenge their dominance. Sure, they give something away for free so fretards and groupis keep on chating "FOSS wil save the world, FOSS will save the world"
Actually, world is getting worse and worse - and the biggest supporters of FOSS are exactly the same companies that are making it worse.
I don't follow, how can anyone in the FOSS world "take away" you ability to use something ?
If you are locked into the MS ecosystem, then MS can turn you off - terminate your account, disable your licenses, and you are stuffed.
The worst that can happen is that someone stops developing a package. That doesn't stop you using it, and it doesn't stop someone else (or another group) simply taking the code and carrying on. On that, a few times we've seen a business that's supporting a dual-licenced product (get the free version, or pay and get the new features sooner, plus get support) decide to try and screw the system by withdrawing the free version. Well, because (usually) of the GPL, users can fork the codebase and develop it themselves. IIRC, the still free version has then gone on to live, while the now crippled one withers a bit - as no-one will contribute any effort to it any more.
I've got some really old software running here - because I've not got round to updating it yet. It just carries on, and I'll take the risk of not having the latest bug fixes for stuff that wasn't even in the code I'm running. Were it commercial under today's "keep paying if you'd like your data to survive" regime, more than likely it would have just stopped working when the vendor decided it was time for it to die.
Nothing insurmountable.
1 - Don't hoard data and you're in the clear.
2 - Cash, provide a big pot of gold for anyone providing "Daggy EU Linux". The VC capital will come.
3 - It has been enshittified. Mostly because of bad security. Who caused most (not all) bad security? I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers.
4 - That's a problem for competition commissions.Most have no teeth. Nor understand the ways in which duopolies function.
5 - Agreed. But somehow good applications still exist for Linux.
6 - AD isn't what AD used to be. Now it's all about Entra. and Facebook login, and Google login, and Apple Login, et al. But what were talking about is a nice glossy front-end to an LDAP/Kerberos backend - that just works. (Well, hides enough of the problems from clueless admins).
7 - Removing the financial incentive to close drivers. Make the copyright/trade secret/patent a much smaller time. Let a hardware make money by making hardware. Everyone wants it because it does what people want it.
8 - The purpose isn't to foster the US, but rather, let the EU control its own destiny. And there are more places in the world than just the EU and the US.
Enshittifacation has nothing to do with security. It's products that are made only to make shareholders richers, while making users' life miserable, but they no longer have a choice, so they must swallow it.
And that's a direct consequences of FOSS - since you don't pay for software, money come from different interests which are not selling software.
The basic flaw of FOSS is that developing software costs money. Those money must come from somewhere. If a company invests in some FOSS, and give it awat, it's because it plans to make money in another way, and today that's exploiting users to make shareholders rich. And you can't no longer "vote with yout money", because you don't pay the software, and you don't have alternatives, because you can't compete with free, and thereby today making money from selling software become almost impossible - unless you are already the ruler of your sector (i.e. Adobe).
That's the real meaning of enshittfication.
VCs want their money back to. And state subsidies can't become the norm for software development - why taxpayers should subsidize the big companies exploiting "free labour" to make their shareholders rich?
AD is not only logins - that's the issue. Sure, Microsoft it's doing its best to make Linux a viable opportunity crippling Windows as much as it can. But that's exactly what I mean when I say IT is going backwards. Sooon someone will introduce punched cards and teletypes and will tell that they are the greatest innovations of all times...
Drivers do give in insight of how hardware works, and they are tightly integrated with firmware - and they can still give a competitive advantage if your drivers deliver results that competition can't match. Especially now that a lot of processing is moved away from hardware itself and is in software.
Trade secrets are trade secrets. You can't force someone to disclose them. Patents are a way to have them disclosed in exchange for a protection for some time. Why Google, Facebook and TitKTok don't give away they algorithms and their server side code? Why an hardware makes should do that, and others not?
EU to control its own destiny must avoid to work for other entities, allowing them to cut their investments even more, and profit from someone else's ones.
Writing out a bunch of bad takes and naming it 'What a bunch of mistakes' is a brilliant bit of humor.
I'll admit that it went over my head for quite a bit longer than I'dve liked. I saw the bit about the GDPR and was like "Oh yeah, but by having a web server on the Internet, am I offering the service of transmitting the contents of that website to European data subjects upon their request, requiring me to process their personal information (their IP address) in generating the responding packets and therefore giving rise to a requirement for me to appoint an Article 27 representative at ridiculously burdensome expense for a website hosting nothing but a picture of a teddy bear laying on top of a pizza box? That whole pile of legislation sure seems like it was written by moro^H^H^H^H^H nontechnical people with communication difficulties."
The bit about Linux lacking AD levels of controls? It's like it was written to get someone to point out how certain malignant parts of the Linux ecosystem have been actively moving in that direction or something. That would've attracted a whole storm of negative comments.
Using FOSS to conflate the Free Software and Open Source Software camps was another brilliant bit, because it's basically doing the exact thing that https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html describes.
You go between talking about how FOSS killed competition in the software market to how awful the appearance of native FOSS apps are. As a spot of criticism, you didn't even bring up anything fun like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3092 and how frustrating it is to be an Xfce user subjected to unilateral UI design decisions of people who made the GIMP's UI "work". I suppose I can't fault you too strongly for sticking to the 'pulling stuff out of your ass' style.
I give it fifteen out of nineteen common scrying pigeons.
Oh, I see what's going on. This is a continuation of your satire from earlier, so you responded to what I was going to post before I realized that you were joking! The unhinged demand coupled with the delusional conspiracy theorizing and typos are doing a great job of making the character you're playing look and feel like an actual moron. I'm as dumb as a box of rocks, so I can tell.
In the spirit of good fun, I'll lay out the argument that came about from my reading of the GDPR rather than just its conclusion. I don't really expect an in-character response, since it seems a bit above their level and I doubt they've read the whole GDPR. You could pretend that you're not playing a character and attack these opening paragraphs instead of the body of my argument, or just me in general I guess.
A natural person's IP address is contained within the set of all 'information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person', satisfying the Art 4(1) definition of 'personal data'. An operating system's TCP/IP stack, by automated means, collects and uses IP addresses, including the IP addresses of natural persons, satisfying the Art 4(2) definition of 'processing'. The GDPR must apply to processing TCP connections because Art 2(1) is satisfied.
I operate an LLC which owns the infrastructure I use for some personal activities. I may not have an Art 2(2)(c) exemption for "purely personal" activity.
Responding to a TCP connection involving an IP address belonging to an identifiable natural person within the Union seems to be a service, so that seems to satisfy Art 3(2)(a). By Art 27(1), responding to TCP connections to identifiable natural persons within the Union seems to create a requirement for such a respondent to designate in writing a representative within the Union. Noncompliance with Art 27(1) satisfies Art 83(4)(a), and so is punishable by fines of up to the higher of 10,000,000 EUR or 2% of total worldwide annual turnover for the previous financial year under Art 83(4).
I may have a defense under Art 27(2)(a), but that depends very heavily on the definition of 'occasional'. Is once per year occasional? Once per day? Once per second? Once per unit of Planck time? My server doesn't log anything, so I can't determine how occasional my processing of personal data is.
So: If Art 3(2)(a) is satisfied, and if I have neither an Art 2(2)(c) nor an Art 27(2)(a) exemption, then I am out of compliance with Art 27(1) and punishable according to Art 83 "for a website hosting nothing but a picture of a teddy bear laying on top of a pizza box", with maximum fines that are significantly higher than my net worth.
In your frothing you missed a really important glaringly obvious permission: "as required to provide the service".
In order to serve you a web page, I need to process your IP address. As that's required to provide the service the data subject specifically asked me to do, and explicitly provided their IP, I have permission to do that.
I also have permission to store that IP address for a reasonable time in relation to providing the service - so yes, connection logs are fine.
I do not however have permission to attempt to link that IP with any other data, or to retain it forever.
GDPR is a very reasonable piece of legislation. There is nothing onerous at all, unless your business revolves around abusing personal data.
I'm a moron who's probably swinging at windmills. I would love some concrete evidence that I'm a cuckoo who's worried about a nothingburger.
Articles 5 to 7 aren't very long and they cover the principles of processing personal data, the lawfulness of processing personal data, and conditions for consent. I suggest that you review those sections, then explain to me why you believe that you're allowed to process personal data because it's "required to provide the service". The GDPR is not so flimsy that you could bypass it by simply claiming that the real world doesn't work the way that its authors think it does.
What if the data subject you're providing the service to hasn't provided informed consent? That makes the processing unlawful. How do you get informed consent from someone before they ever send a SYN packet containing their IP address to you in order to make the processing lawful? How do you prevent your TCP/IP stack from processing nonconsensual packets without collecting (a type of processing) the IP address?
Also, my concerns are about Article 27, not about whether the processing is permissible. I'm in a third country, so I can't see how I can escape from the need to appoint (in writing) a representative in the Union without relying on the vague term 'occasional'.
Some fair points, including #3 and #6 - working in enterprise IT, I see #6 as being the biggest blocker. Centralised enterprise management of big fleets is an A1 priority for corporates, and I cannot see anything in the Linux world that's genuinely capable of that. We tried, a couple of years ago, with FreeIPA and the like (Red Hat Directory - doesn't look on the same level, but unsure), but it was an unfathomable nightmare and we got nowhere.
Oh hi, kmorwath. Good to see The Register's resident bee-in-their-bonnet anti-FOSSer chip in with another *completely* unbiased contribution! ;-)
So, I'll address your "FOSS and Linux destroyed competition!" talking point with the same example I used last time....
> 3) FOSS is the foundation of the actual Internet olygopoly. [..] In exchange, IT has been "enshitttified" and the clock turned back thirty years at least.
Thirty years ago? You mean when Linux was still a minor niche player and Microsoft's de facto monopoly with Windows was nearing its peak, with the majority of its former proprietary rivals were already dead or dying?
> 4) As a corollary of point 3), FOSS destroyed competition. Today very few, if any, company can grow selling software. Most startups are just bought by one of the Internet molochs as soon as their software becomes a menace to their olygopoly.
So who do you blame for Microsoft and their decades-long near-monopoly on the OS market with very much proprietary systems? That started in the early 1980s with MS-DOS, long before there was a remotely-plausible open source rival.
Which part of the non-existent open source competition back then was to blame for poor Microsoft being forced to abuse its market position and crush other, equally proprietary, rivals to its own OSes and other software?
I have a different opinion of yours - but I built it on facts, not a religious belief that software can be built without money, or money coming from uninterested parties that will share everything with you.
Because I know people, and I know companies. And I can't blame people who would like to make a decent living by creating and selling software.
I fully understand the Microsoft issues at the end of 1990s. I was one of the few who tried to stay away from MS. I did use OS/2. I did use Borland software. But many user flocked to Windows, and it's not asking them to flock blindly to FOSS that you change the situation - since FOSS is not "free" - it's dominatate by a few megacorps that pay its development (and do it because they use it to make money in "another way"). Software piracy was part of the problem. While MS could stay afloat even if many people pirated its products, others were not so large. Freetards are always the issue.
You can refuse to see it, but that's the ugly truth. And FOSS didn't make software better - actually made it worse. Because when you're the product and not the (paying) user, there is no invecentive to make it useful and better - the incentives are in turning it into something that spies you all the day to bring money in form your data. Sure, you can use some unknown by most fork that tries to remove the spyware.... but how many do it? Today Chrome is a worse monopoly than IE. And all your emails belong to GMail, today.
Why Google - or Facebook, or Amazon - don't invest in a really advanced Linux Desktop that could compete with Windows? Because they need you to live on their servers (for which they don't share any code with you, and you can't check it....) through a browser where they can exploit you better. They don't want a **Personal** computer where your data are away from their claws. And thereby MS turned Windows in a spyware too - giving upgrades away for free, and hoarding data. Mozilla can't stay afloat withot Google, that is perfectly happy there is a "competitor" with a negligible user share so it can shield it from anti-trust issues.
FOSS was not and is not the solution to the MS monopoly. It's just another monopoly, and hinders competition even more, since most people refuse to pay for software as they pay for everything else. So once a data hoarding and ads slinging business subsideze some software, most people will use it blindly, and the only one who could compete is another data hoarder and ads slinger. Or not even that, lookt at how MS adopted Chrome to avoid to invest real money in a competiting browser (Nadella failed completely - and stopped investing).
EU should invest in privacy-first commercial software. If this doesn't lure the VC wanting to make quick bucks from user data, the better.
The sooner people stop to look at the "free" finger, and see the hungry, greedy claws behind, the better.
> "I have a different opinion of yours - but I built it on facts, not a religious belief that [etc]"
That's odd, because in response to that longwinded rationalisation of your zealotry- blaming FOSS for killing off competition and driving down quality- I offered a simple, clear example based on established facts.
Namely that Microsoft enjoyed a decades-long near-monopoly with what was- even then- a dated and substandard OS, abused the power that gave them to kill off competition from rival products and held back progress for decades. And that all of this happened long before there was any meaningful competition from open source or non-proprietary rivals.
And, as before, you didn't- or couldn't- deny any of that. Indeed, you implicitly acknowledged it when you said "it's not asking them to flock blindly to FOSS that you change the situation".
> "I was one of the few who tried to stay away from MS. I did use OS/2. I did use Borland software. But many user flocked to Windows"
Good for you. But the failure of OS/2 and the rest of the competition had nothing to do with FOSS or Linux, which didn't start to take off until most of the proprietary rivals were already dead or in terminal decline.
Linux was- and is- the closest thing to a serious rival to Windows, and it still hasn't exactly killed it off, which weakens your pro-proprietary, anti-FOSS "arguments".
> "Software piracy was part of the problem. While MS could stay afloat even if many people pirated its products, others were not so large. Freetards are always the issue."
So you're no longer trying blaming open source itself, but shifting the goalposts to include software piracy and them lumping it all together as the work of "freetards"?
> "Today Chrome is a worse monopoly than IE. And all your emails belong to GMail, today."
Whether or not Chrome's monopoly is "worse", it certainly *is* as bad as IE. Of course, it's ironic that the proprietary IE's monopoly and resultant stagnation which held back the web for years was only broken due to the introduction of Firefox, i.e. FOSS software.
GMail is a web-based service not tied to the browser and could just as easily be built on proprietary software. (What are Outlook.com and Office 365 running on these days anyway?)
Also, a couple of points I should make before I finish. Personally, I'm *not* ideologically opposed to proprietary software, I just disagree with *your* rabid ideological opposition to open source. Nor am I happy about the market dominance of the likes of Google- the difference is that, unlike yourself, I don't blame that solely on the availability of FOSS.
It's funny that FOSS zealots call me a zealot because I point out issues nobody cares to answer because you have no answers.
I never denied the MS monopoly - and I was then anti-MS far more than FOSS zealots are, but for sensible plain reasons, not just hate because they don't fit a religion.
And as you said, Linux was still unable to rival Windows completely, but you fail to ask yourself why. I'll explain it again: those wjo pay Linux development are not interested in an all-around OS, they are only interested in a server OS that servers their needs - today the huge data gathering and ads slinging business, tomorrow maybe AI built on that hoading and better ways to control people's behaviour.
The least thing the Linux Foundation investors want is a personal OS that takes users' data away from them. Am I wrong? Show me, please....
Software piracy and FOSS are closely related. FOSS appealed people who for strange reason believe some people's work should not be paid. They buy probably a $1000 phone, but believe software should be free. If you're a small company with a few products and most people pirate your software you'll go out of business. Actually freetards helped MS to achieve its dominant position.
Most people pirated MS software because it was easy enough, and they were told that the software they should use. And MS took advantage of it - strong licensing came later...
IE dominanto position was broken by the anti-trust investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. It meant MS was no longer free to act as it liked. Still, tell me why Firefox was supplanted by Chrome - which also used sleazy techniques to install on users' machine - but nobody complained because it wasn't Microsoft.
GMail is a very good example because you shall not have a good Linux desktop OS, and a good native mail client (TB has IMHO several issues) - there's no money to be made which such systems if people don't pay for them. Instead GMail keeps all of your emal on Google servers, and also ensures that most users are always loggeed in to Google, so data hoarding is even better.
And of course you don't get a chance to see what Google does on its servers, even if it uses tons of FOSS software for which it paid peanuts, compared to the billions it makes.
My "rabid" opposition to FOSS is not ideological - it's just I'm tired.of too many people trying to brainwash everybody that FOSS will save the world, or EU like this article tries to assert. FOSS is not the solution of any problem, if you like to share do it, nobody is telling you should not, but criminalizing commercial closed source code is stupiud and dangerous.
Sure, many FOSS Farm pigs will tell you that FOSS will make you free and will save the world - but that's a lie.
BTW: I'm still expecting someone to explain me how to pay for FOSS softwre development avoiding it is steered towards the interests of those who actually pays for it. It's a basic econonomic issue, there are not free launches, and usually people investing money expect something back.
And as a EU tax payers, I would like to avoid my money go towards helping even more those who try to cage me into their oligopolies.
I never said FOSS was perfect.
You do realise there might be some legitimate concerns and criticisms tucked away in there that some people (myself included) might pay more attention to- and even agree with- if they weren't smothered in reams of longwinded, foaming-at-the-mouth, rantingly partisan wharrrgarbl blaming FOSS for every evil in the software industry?
(Not that I suspect you'll change that, but whatever).
"7) Often, high-end hardware is not supported under Linux" <-- you may find, as I have often found, that this is nowhere near as true as it once was. Support for high-end h/w under Linux is vastly better than was. This argument used to hold water. Now, not so much.
Summe summarum: Linux is a viable alternative to Win/MacOS these days. Of course, YMMV but that is not surprising.
"5) Linux desktop refuses to become a viable alternative to Windows because, there's "too much heaven in their minds". As long as you run an application in a browser, sure. As soon as you need a native desktop application Linux is a minefield of APIs and ugly GUIs. And WINE is not the solution but for the simplest applications that doesn't need a tight integration with Windows - ab we are to the next point:"
^--- have you looked recently? Suspect possibly not. I and many others have veritable excesses of perfectly stable, consistent, and functional native desktop apps**. I will be one of the first to agree with your statement that WINE is not a solution ... it is better than was, but still fails to meet the (my) requirements (hence my retention of a WIn VM for those special moments when I have to resort to Win for something. That (per my earlier comment) happened twice in 2025, and not at all this far into 2026. OK, 3 weeks is not long. But still.
Truly, much is down to what you prefer. But to characterise Linux desktop as "too much heaven in their minds" is no longer terribly accurate.
** - for clarity, some are paid-for apps (yes, Linux as the base does not mean we Linux acolytes are a bunch of bearded-bobbly-hatted-wierdos who will not use or consider anything not free!). I pay for some apps, and I also use some freebies. Not, I will say, much different from my former Win usage habits and needs. Methinks there is far too much clouding of the issue with the whole FOSS distraction. Serious applications tend to cost money at some level, regardless of what OS you like.
Everthing that can be done to leave the US behind must be done. They are unreliable and untrustworthy. They're proving it daily. Anything that can be done to free the world of Americans and their products is a good idea. Us , in Canada .. well .. were opening mew markets , make new deals with solid partners and as citizens do everything we can not to buy anything made in the US. From produce to cars. The faster we cut ties the better we feel and our Prime Minister , Carney , does a great job at opening our country to the world. I urge everyone and every government to do the same. Turn to other options. There's plenty. I for one as much as is possible , will never buy anything american. Travel is out the question. Ill never set foot there ever the hell again. They elected a madman and keep him there. Hellbent on ww3 and destroying the economy. Time to look elsewhere .. more than time.
I totally agree with you, but:
> ...They are unreliable and untrustworthy...
> ...They elected a madman and keep him there...
USA has been unreliable and untrustworthy since WW2 or before (do you remember the Bretton-Wood system collapse? or the unnecessary nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan? or weapons of mass destruction?, there are zillions of examples). Their actual president is a grotesque exaggeration of those words, but they were always like that. Before the Orange Baby, those who suffer them were those countries/regions not aligned with them, but nowadays their most closed allies are suffering (or could suffer) the same; yes, invasions, coups, wars, economic sanctions, etc. Everything is possible for everybody, and what is more, not even its own population is safe :-(
"since WW2 or before"
No need to go into the details of the lives of the indigenous people, or the African slaves.
The most sickening thing I have ever heard was an old broken toothed Indonesian man talking about his part in the slaughter of millions of suspected communists in his country in the mid 1960s. Rivers literally running red with blood full of dead bodies. I'm glad I can't remember the name of the documentary (there are several out there now if you dare) or his exact words, but I will never forget him matter of factly saying words to the effect of "like a sieve" when describing using a machete to cut the breasts off of living human females and seeing the milk ducts inside. Henry Kissinger thought this was great, the USA trained the officers involved and happily supplied weapons, the same way he thought it was great that you can still see from space the stripes in the Vietnamese landscape from all the millions of gallons of Agent Orange poured on for more than a decade, the same way he thought it was great that people got tossed alive out of helicopters in Chile. He lived out his years in lavish comfort with a Nobel Peace Prize on his mantle. Fuck give them all to Donald Trump.
The same as Bush JR and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Albright hosing down Arabia and Afghanistan with depleted uranium and white phosphorous, while prisoners of war were treated as bad as any throughout history if anyone remembers Abu Ghraib. Our warlord Dostum (who started out communist helping the Soviets while we were flooding the mujahideen with stinger missiles in the 80s!) let Taliban conscript soldier prisoners cook to death in shipping containers on trucks and then we made him a leader of the country.
Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize while he was drone striking wedding parties! Who on Planet Earth still wants one of those besides Trump?
Tens of thousands of Palestinian children have had their limbs blown off. The dead are usually only about 10% of the casualties in any "war", seems like the most ludicrously doublespeak of terms for what has been happening in Gaza. The world stands by and says "tut tut", the USA keeps supplying all of the ammunition.
The Unites Nations was never capable of stopping any of this with permanent seats on the security council, and can ony bring the most powerless of any perpatrators to any kind of justice. IT MAKES ME WANT TO FLING A PLANET KILLING ASTEROID AT THIS WORLD OF HORRORS.
Start with advertising on USA social media. How much money is being wasted by various levels of government on "Google Ads" and "Meta Ads"? Sure you can put up a free account on there and communicate with the public that way if you feel you must, but government spending at any level of any tax payer money on promotion or advertising on those platforms should be outlawed. How many hundreds of billions are being sucked out of economies around the world by just those 2 platforms? That's a big pot of money that instead should be put towards supporting local actual media, and/or into a program like this to create non-USA controlled general computing platforms.
Best for people to just get off those USA social media platforms, but for those who stay on if you see any local company advertise on them you should complain to them. It should hurt sales for any company outside of the USA to advertise on any USA social media platforms.
If you see any news source that is basically just reading USA social media posts to you, you should complain. The pinnacle of lazy reporting, plus free advertising for those USA social media platforms. Heavily fine news outlets for every time they mention any USA social media platform by name, it should be worse than broadcasting one of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words". There's some more money for the pot.
If the names of Google and Facebook were wiped out of the consciousness of everyone outside of the USA, could anyone think of a single harm that would cause to any global citizen?
Any other ideas?
So....Bill Gates and Paul Allen were in a garage in 1980 writing gaming software for CP/M.
So....Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in a garage in 1998 fiddling with their venture capital start up.
So....Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates were fiddling with relational database theory in their garage in 1977.
So....Jeff Bezos founded an online bookstore in 1994.
So....Bob Young and Marc Ewing founded Red Hat in 1995.
So what were British and European venture capitalists doing while all this was going on?
...they were watching BL and ICL and INMOS go down the toilet.......
....and today (2026) all we hear is whining about "US dominance"..................and "sovereignty".........
.....please.....give me a break!!!!
…it's that US corporations have functional monopolies with impregnable moats. But not technical moats, legal ones.
Cory Doctorow's been banging this drum over the years that the US' impregnable moat isn't its technical excellence, but the simple brute fact that they've criminalized the circumvention of access controls, no matter what, in a move that he calls Federal Contempt of Business Model. Not only that, but the Americans, through the US Trade Representatives, have forced every other nation on Earth to abide by this law, on the pain of getting tariffs.
Well, guess what? You've got tariffs. We've got tariffs. Everyone's got tariffs now. That sucks, but you know what? If the arsonist threatening to burn your house down if you don't do what they say has burnt down your house, there's nothing that motherfucker has over your head now. Instead, what they've done is that they've become bloated, corrupt, sessile, uncompetitive, and most importantly, with large vulnerable margins ripe for the taking.
Obviously you'd need to do more than just repeal anti-circumvention — you'd need to support and fund the would-be pirates— er, I mean, privateers— wait, no, I mean, ahem, innovators and disruptors to, hem hem, raid the fat margins— I mean, liberate money into the global economy of US corporations and tech companies by offering their hostages— I mean, consumers a viable exit into your businesses. What are the Americans going to do? Tariff you? The stick's been used and the carrot kind of sucks, so what's stopping you now?
The only downside, of course, are the EU corporations who also take advantage of the current IP regime. But considering the fact that those motherfuckers use those laws to cheat in emissions and brick public infrastructure, maybe gutting them would be a net benefit to the EU as a whole.
I mean, it could be you first, or the Canadians.
Yeah, that, and advertising. Massive advertising. It's psychological fact, folks don't care much for free stuff when there's an advertised alternative they can pay for instead ... they just don't want to look cheap, especially when they are.
So I'd say the EU should spend good money sponsoring ads for FOSS during major sports events. Ads like "LibreOffice. It does everything Office 365 does and more, and it's free! Try it today!", or "Linux. It does everything Windows 11 does and more, without spying on your daughters or forcing you to upgrade your computer every year, plus it runs the world's top supercomputers, and it's free! Try it today!". Million dollar ads during the Superbowl, FIFA World Cup, Formula One World Championship, Winter Olympics, Summer Olympics, Paralympics, etc ...
Build mass enthusiasm for the tech, and reap the sovereignty rewards! ;)
I mean, you don't even need to advertise the “free” point, you can plaster the faces of the billionaires who made bank, with a simple message:
THIS ASSHOLE HAS YOUR LIFE BY THE NUTS.
HERE'S HOW YOU TAKE IT BACK.
The best part is that these charmless motherfuckers make it so easy. It's literally global. You won't even have to tweak it very much for it to be very effective. Even the Americans hate these assholes.
And in the Uk after all the recent outages to core State services, we're pumping even more dough into MS, AWS and Fujitsu . . . . . China had it right from day one. Good luck to the EU, but I suspect they'll underestimate the latent resistance to retooling, and the sheer cost needed to make it stick.
Continental Europe is much more predisposed to local sourcing than the UK. So I actually, expect much of France and Germany to revert to local sourcing. The UK depending on who is in power, and their willingness to be unpopular, will dilly and dally, wring their hands and after a few incantations of “we have a special relationship”, decide to purchase from the US because it is “cheaper” etc. failing to understand that the reason why there is no UK equivalent to Microsoft et al, is directly attributable to their mindset.
Agree, however, we do need to be more specific. For example we really need full support for ODF v1.4 (Dec 2025), yet ability to import and export to v1.3 and v1.2 files for compatibility.
Fortunately, Oasis has been quietly working away on a whole suite of Standards, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to arrive at an initial core profile; effectively a massive update to the MAP/TOP/UK GOSIP 3.0 (1998) profile.
Should be possible to have an initial profile within months.
Additional work can define necessary API’s and (XML) interchange formats, to ensure application and platform interoperability.
People have been saying this for years, these regulations tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses. Now the EU is only scared of being left behind because of the AI craze, which is why they're only acting now and not any time in the past decade.
These efforts are laudable, but the various groups of unelected officials within the EU will not let any of these new initiatives slide without trying to stir their finger into the pot. The EU is practically fighting itself at times, with some groups consistently trying to push for chat control and automated scanning of every iota of data while other EU groups are desperately trying to stop these privacy-invasive regulations from being enacted. Like the new proposed "cookie law" which basically says "ok we still think privacy is important but we want to anonymize all this data and feed it directly to AI companies".
The end result will most likely be that the endless bureaucracy continues until the higher-ups intervene, at which point we will end up with various software stacks that claim to be "open" but can't be modified, enforced by keys on the hardware level (which already exists with Pluton). Don't want the rubes messing with their software to tinker with their PC, at least not if they still want to use their bank or watch movies.
"Those regulations regressively hit startups and SMEs the hardest..."
And those "regulations" are in the room with is right now?
Or is the author just parroting the typical talking-points of right-wing EU critics that were drafted in St Petersburg?
I am a serial entrepreneur who has built companies in South America, the US and many other countries. The one thing that was not a hurdle in the EU was "regulations".
- Language is a barrier. (Try to sell in France if you are not french)
- The lack of European identity and unity is (try signing up for Hetzner or Mailbox.org if your mobile number is from Czech, your company is Estonian, but you have a German IP number)
- The lack of educated Venture Capital is nauseating (but bootstrapping to €10M is the new unicorn anyway)
But those terrible terrible "regulations" are just monsters living in Russian anti-EU propaganda and are certainly not better or worse than what you face as a founder in the US. Quite the opposite: The DMA and DSA for instance actually PROTECT you from the Tech Bro mob, crushing every competitor.
Symbian was a successful operating system born from Psion and perfect for low powered and embedded devices. Many built in features making it safer as well as lower cost in terms of processor and battery requirements. It would not be impossible to reopen this, the code still exists and documentation as well.
Most importantly it isn't full of half hidden back doors for the USA to use when they want to stop the European military defending itself (or allies like Canada) against Putin's puppet. Even better it has far less unbelievable security holes than windoze
OP mentions technology stack but seems focused on desktop OS and popular applications.
Switching to a flavor(s) of Linux and document file formats sn't a huge issue. The real issue is the dependence of USA megacorps on where we store our data and how we access it. They've sewn this up nicely and it's going to be a major headache to untie it all.
The EU needs to fund an EU based could infrastructure. The EU needs it's own Amazon Cloud, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure . We should have an EU workable alternative to Office 365 or Google Workspace. EU citizens should be able to use a PC, cellphone, get driving directions, watch TV streams or go on social media without relying on these megacorps.
The EU also needs to fund an EU based mobile OS. A fork of Android would be the logical start.
They'd need legislation for government funded services, banks, utility companies, supermarkets etc. to work on the mobile OS so no more online banking apps etc only working if downloaded from Google Play or Apple Store. Hopefully the EU will have rolled out its replacement for Visa and MasterCard too by then.
