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.

Sounds like we need a European software agency then. While these projects are technically independent of the EU, Ariane and the A400M are great examples of European collaboration.

We need the same for software: create a company/agency/institute, fund them appropriately (the A400M had a development cost of over 20 billions to give a ballpark figure) and ask them to produce an OS, a browser and an office suite. Make sure it's done with a product mindset, that they have ownership of it. Pay market rate for the employees. And within a decade we could have a credible alternative to Apple/Microsoft, then we can mandate the different EU administrations to switch to this software stack.

The biggest road block I can foresee is the infighting about how to "fairly" distribute the jobs. My worry is that instead of having a couple of locations that can each focus on a key aspect of the project, we would end up with 27 offices, with all the siloing that it entails. Which is literally one of Ariane's greatest weaknesses...

I'm sure a centrally planned initiative will beat the market and create a better product for you to use in Europe, just like Lada defeated Ford!

I am not advocating for central planning. As I underscored in my comment, I advocate for something closer to the defense procurement model: where the market is failing to provide an appropriate off the shelf product and the state contracts an entity (usually a private company, but in the case of software it could be a public agency) to make it for them. This is a model that is currently in use in the US, in the EU, and actually worked well in the USSR too, their Ladas (and consumer products in general) might have been terrible but their defense industry was great.

The USSR defense industry also funded multiple OKBs that would compete with each other for projects.

In the EU's case, multi-party competitive bidding, with the winner taking the prime slot and others being assigned modular chunks of the product, sounds attractive.

Specifically, with the stipulation that results would be used as a criteria in future bids.

tl;dr -- Use the pyramid league system (e.g. from football) with promotion and relegation to efficiently create industry competition. Fuck up too many projects, down the pyramid you go.

Sounds good to me. I am not too dogmatic about the exact implementation of who does the work and your system seems to align incentives properly while also avoiding the too many cooks in the pot/too much dilution of the money into small projects to have an impact issues.

From past failures the 2 things I want to be addressed are: 1) Have a proper procurement agency with actual experts at the helm, they are the "customer", they hand over the bids, they measure success, they should of course listen to end users. 2) Shield the project from petty internal politics. While I understand that political interference is inevitable, especially if you get public funding. The top priority is to have a good alternative to existing software in these 3 categories I defined. Not yet another job program/kickback to politically well connected entities.