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.

Well, you could also decide to pay a linux distribution of your choice.

KDE is a German project, GNOME a French/German project, most of Debian's maintainers come from the EU, Manjaro is a German project, probably most Arch, NixOS and Alpine maintainers come from the EU as well...

The problem with open source projects is always "unopinionatism". The only project that comes to mind where the design language feels actually integrated are KDE Plasma (not before) and maybe elementaryOS.

But those projects need a lot of funding to come to feature parity with Microsoft's and Apple's alternatives. Especially in the enterprise/corporate product portfolio, and system landscape administration.

Again, none of these projects can solve the larger issue. KDE does not do what Microsoft does. You can not give 100M to KDE to have them setup and maintain your government infrastructure.

So, no you don't need a "Microsoft-esque" company, you need independent service providers who just know their stuff. Today, a company (any company!) with the proper skills CAN offer setting up and maintaining government infrastructure, independent and sovereign from Microsoft, by using commoditized hardware and open source software, with no long term vendor lock-in.

The offerings do exist, and get some traction. If done right, they should be cheaper in both short and long run, compared to Microsoft licensing.

So, what's holding us back?

1) One element is aggressive pricing for key customers and partners, on the part of the smarter incumbents (in this case Microsoft).

2) Another is a "reverse network effect": Scarcity of talent to create companies like the ones I suggest. And with too little supply, the demand side will be afraid to "not choose IBM" (figuratively).

3) A third is Microsoft 365's real-time collaborative editing. Yeah, really. The needs of some specific users get to dominate decision-making, since the key decisions are pitched in PowerPoint, analysed in Word, budgeted in Excel and distributed using Outlook. A lot of old dogs would have to learn new tricks.

But yeah, somebody really should do it...