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.

I've long wished Red Hat would open some kind of consumer/business facing market. Fedora is already so damn close, it just needs a little bit more love. Red Hat could partner with Framework, or Lenovo, or Dell for the hardware. Red Hat is already so connected with various stakeholders (Linux Foundation, Gnome, etc) that they wouldn't even have the huge barrier-of-entry of herding all those cats.

The EU funding or putting out an RFP or something would be amazing.

The hardware vendors should just offer OS choice at checkout time, and revenue sharing for the resulting choices.

I don't disagree, but without some sort of formal or official support from the distribution, I think this is a tall ask. Some vendors have shipped Ubuntu and Fedora on laptops, but not many. If they were going to truly do this, I think it's reasonable for them to expect a minimum level of support from the parent company behind the operating system. Even just for training and bug purposes, people could easily end up getting an OS they aren't comfortable with and complaining at the laptop vendor for it.