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.

While that’s sure nice to have as a customer, I fail to see how it is strategically relevant to the EU to have something similar here. I’d value a functioning, open, and compatible ecosystem of European software much more.

Then I think that you would probably need to create some sort of centralized European FOSS software support, because in the ideal case that everything was interoperable without too much work, you're left with 20 different software projects to get in contact with if something goes wrong. And if something goes wrong in the interop between those 20 projects written on wildly different stacks, there's nobody to call.

If some genius hasn't already put together a turnkey umbrella project that meets your needs, you're going to have to find your own genius. That's different than just calling MS or Apple, even if their support is slow or annoying. I think Oracle counts, too.

It's not like Europe couldn't build these systems out of FOSS (just like Oracle and others, btw), they just haven't done it until now and it would have been just as easy to do 15 years ago. I think they'd rather get courted and bribed by American behemoths.

Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

I'm an embedded firmware dev, so admittedly I am dealing with an entirely different list of vendors and asking for different things than the typical sysadmin or devops type.

With that said, it has certainly not been my experience that "having someone to call" actually solves my problems all that often. It's occasionally a nice to have, but normally I am reluctant to even start the process because my experience has been that it is usually a net drain on my time and energy to do so.

At this point, I am far more concerned with having access to source code so that I have a fighting chance of creating a workaround for myself, and failing that I don't want to contact my vendor so much as I want to replace them.