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Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

(nlnet.nl)
473 points edent | 4 comments | 23 Apr 25 07:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.824s | source
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constantcrying ◴[23 Apr 25 08:02 UTC] No.43769695[source]▶
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.

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thmsths ◴[23 Apr 25 15:08 UTC] No.43773087[source]▶
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...

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WhyNotHugo ◴[24 Apr 25 12:00 UTC] No.43781662[source]▶
I don't want a "European Microsoft", or to build an equivalent of Google, but in the EU. The whole idea of "one huge organisation to meet all your IT needs" is exactly what I dislike about that model. In fact, replacing these US organisations with EU-based equivalents is no more than nationalism without any realistic change.

I want to see an ecosystem where small businesses and organisations can thrive in the IT space, just like they do in the offline space.

To provide an analogy for this: a lot of areas in the US have only a huge Walmart where people do ALL their shopping. In NL we don't have a "Dutch Walmart"; instead each neighbourhood has a bakery, a fish shop, a cheese shop, etc. Cities are full or small restaurants and bars. Many of all these shops are operated by their owners.

I want to see the same in the IT space.

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1. kingnothing ◴[24 Apr 25 17:02 UTC] No.43784974[source]▶
Most companies don't want what you want. They don't want to sign 50 different contracts with 50 different vendors and have to do due diligence on all of them. They don't want to negotiate rates with all of those companies every time a contract renewal comes up. They don't want the instability of working with startups that may close shop with little notice.

What they want is a couple of big, reliable companies who offer services that just work. They want dev teams to be able to explore a new service by simply spinning up a POC with a new offering from a vendor they already have a relationship with; they don't want to figure out which of the 20 different EU companies who offer LLMs or managed Kafka they need to contact, sit through sales calls, and do security evaluations on before the team can start work.

As an American, I definitely don't like having to drive to a mega store and do all my shopping there. The European city model is far superior -- I love traveling there and walking to the bakery, cheese shop, and butcher to buy a meal. But as a dev and manager of many years, I definitely do not want to see that be the norm in software. I love startups who offer unique services, but from a practical perspective, I also love that it takes a day to spin up something in AWS vs months of contract negotiations, trials, sales calls, etc to get signed up with a vendor who offers something outside of AWS.

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2. WhyNotHugo ◴[25 Apr 25 11:11 UTC] No.43792359[source]▶
I hope you'll see the contradiction in this stance.

As a small company, you don't want to deal with small companies because it's too much effort. You just want to deal with one huge company which is your supplier for all your services. But you do want your clients to come to you and negotiate with your small company.

Assume your clients have the same mindset as you: why would they buy from you instead of buying from the same "one-stop-shop" where you're buying everything? They don't want to deal with small businesses such as yours, just like you don't want to.

Your "supplier of all services" might not offer what you're offering right now, but the day they do, you'll quickly be out of business. You and, gradually, all other businesses.

---

As a tangential note: 50 IT service providers is a darn lot. I suspect that is 10x of what the average business needs.

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3. kingnothing ◴[25 Apr 25 19:42 UTC] No.43797815[source]▶
There was a miscommunication here. Large companies don't want to deal with small companies since it's high effort to go through the whole procurement process that generally takes months.

The small companies I've worked at were generally quite happy to work with other small companies where procurement consists of a couple employees telling a founder they need a service, then the founder subscribes with a credit card later that week.

I don't generally work at small companies these days :)

50 might have been an over-estimate, but I thought you were advocating for a decentralized EU tech space, where I would need one vendor for each part of my tech stack... instead of using AWS for EKS + SQS + SNS + RDS, I would have one vendor for my managed kubernetes cluster, one for kafka, another for APNS notifications, and someone else to host the databases.

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4. fc417fc802 ◴[26 Apr 25 15:10 UTC] No.43804299{3}[source]▶
If the entire stack is individual EU funded FOSS projects that are stitched together then maybe small companies could offer the sort of integrated service that you're describing.