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.

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

its also very little compared with how much they spend on US suppliers.

It also does not address the issue of private sector dependence on the US.

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system

What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

>What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

The complete package. Hardware, software and ecosystem by a single company. Only Microsoft and Google have anything coming close to this.

Organisations are unlikely to rely only on Apple Software though.

Most organisations do not use MS or Google hardware though.

MS can provide everything for a standard office desktop, but the real strength of their OS is the availability of lots of third party software.

Don't forget enterprise management. Windows makes it easy to maintain a fleet of endpoints much easier than MacOS or Linux.

I'm confused about this assertion. Managing fleets of thousands of Linux machines via declarative role-based configuration management is completely normal. Linux also has a way better story with updates that activate instantly (occasionally requiring 10s to reboot for a kernel update) with easy rollbacks if something goes wrong (e.g. nixos).

What exactly does Windows have that makes it easier to manage machines?

> What exactly does Windows have that makes it easier to manage machines?

A large marketing budget and sysadmin / devops outreach in a way that no single and all Linux distributions collectively haven't matched. Integration of things into a cohesive single tool instead of a grab bag of tools that move from hyped to normal to unmaintained in a number of years.

But on the application server side, Linux is extremely popular. Config management via some tool like ansible or puppet is a table stakes skill in that space. Likewise with some kind of ldap based config for users. I would actually be surprised if someone said they did "devops" and they meant they managed anything with Windows. Typically that's "IT", but I don't understand why.

KDE is also an obviously more "professional"/"serious" desktop environment that just makes it easy to open the tools to do work without a bunch of crap to turn off and without pointless UI churn requiring people to relearn how to use it. As far as bugs go, Windows IME has to be rebooted around 80% of the time after sleeping because either the WSL driver crashes or the VPN enters a permanently locked up state. I've had the start menu just stop responding to clicks when everything else is working normally. The thing is wonky as hell, and usually needs to be rebooted via the "hold power for 10s" method (do normal people even know about that?). I never run into issues on Linux (Fedora or Nixos).

The UI is also trash. e.g. if you type "reboot" or "restart" in the start menu (a common need, per above), it doesn't find the command you obviously want to run (KDE does for both), and it hides the (unlabeled pictograph) button you'd need to click to find it, requiring you to close the menu and re-open it. Nothing is organized anymore, so you need to rely on search, but search doesn't even work.