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Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

(nlnet.nl)
473 points edent | 5 comments | 23 Apr 25 07:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | 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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pickledoyster ◴[23 Apr 25 08:19 UTC] No.43769766[source]▶
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.

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constantcrying ◴[23 Apr 25 08:22 UTC] No.43769785[source]▶
I think that is a question of architecture.

What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.

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1. repelsteeltje ◴[23 Apr 25 08:48 UTC] No.43769930[source]▶
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?

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2. wqaatwt ◴[23 Apr 25 08:50 UTC] No.43769947[source]▶
There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?
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3. flir ◴[23 Apr 25 10:11 UTC] No.43770385[source]▶
Yes. If you want your vendors to interop with each other in any way, it's the same n^2 lines of communication problem you have in dev teams. In fact, it's worse, because the vendors are antagonistic towards each other - it's in their interests that you ditch some of the others and give more of your business to them.
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4. bluGill ◴[23 Apr 25 13:21 UTC] No.43771854{3}[source]▶
That depends on the vendor. Small vendors know that they can't do everything and are happy they are part of the pie. Medium sized often dream of getting big and so if they think they can by taking a large slice they will.

It also depends on how your relationship is structured and what you demand. I work for a very large company, but some of our customers won't even look at us until we pass a third party interoperability certification, and thus getting that certification becomes critical to us even though most customers don't care. Once we are certified interoperability issues are rare (they happen all the time because of the sear number of customers, but most of the time things just work because everyone is following the standard). The standard and certification has been refined over a couple decades now and so most of the things that can go wrong either are either updated in the standard and certification test; or they are at least tribal knowledge of "don't do that it won't work"

5. sybercecurity ◴[23 Apr 25 14:07 UTC] No.43772413[source]▶
Sometimes one large corporation feels like working with multiple smaller vendors. Products are too siloed and don't work together the way they claim, etc.