Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.

Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.

While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

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

I think that is a question of architecture.

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

> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you.

This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.

> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.

> Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.

Dear god no. That's how you end up with contracts assigned to "Joe's Nephew Software Design" that don't just smell but reek of nepotism (although I will admit, the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better), neverending GDPR et al. compliance issues, and massive employee overhead in training and onboarding costs when every local government does its own shit and economies of scale can't be leveraged.

Also, even assuming "Joe's Nephew Software Design" manages to complete the DMV software on time and in budget... who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates? It's (way) easier and cheaper to do continuous maintenance when there are lots of clients to fund upkeep, compared to just one.

> the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better.

You said it yourself. Corruption and abuse of power will always exist. But if I had to choose between the invisible corruption of faceless bureaucrats enabling cronies or the local crook who will try to put his finger on the pie, I will take the local crook every time. At the very least, I can get a bunch of people and bang on their doors with some pitchforks.

> who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates?

We are taking about a scenario where open source is the norm and the stakes for each individual project are lower. "off-the-shelf" components would be the norm. Whatever customization or improvements done by the departments would also be released as FOSS.