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Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

(nlnet.nl)
473 points edent | 4 comments | 23 Apr 25 07:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.838s | source
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constantcrying ◴[23 Apr 25 08:02 UTC] No.43769695[source]▶
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.

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1. pydry ◴[23 Apr 25 08:19 UTC] No.43769768[source]▶
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...
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2. constantcrying ◴[23 Apr 25 08:27 UTC] No.43769823[source]▶
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.
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3. pydry ◴[23 Apr 25 09:09 UTC] No.43770050[source]▶
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.

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4. fidotron ◴[23 Apr 25 15:12 UTC] No.43773113{3}[source]▶
> 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.

This is legitimately a really good suggestion.