European parliament strongly recommends open source software
european-pirateparty.eu
european-pirateparty.eu
Right now there is a complete framework for research grants (national organizations and the European Research Council), but afaict no such thing exists for open source projects. I think this should change.
Also, there should be structural government support for security hardening/audits.
Then compare it to the 10-100 billion euros spent annually on scientific research [1].
I'm not saying that the budgets should be equal, but there should be some proportionality.
I also think it should be easier for universities to have scientific programmers (who would write open source software) on their payroll.
It's especially important for Europe as more research on open protocols means that the internet can become less dependent on large US corporations. And for this type of research you'd need developers.
The best implementation I can see is for government institutions to vote on the most useful OSS software with awards for the winners.
There is plenty of anxieties around the subject still, so work does not take place in the open.
Supporting Open Source projects that are used internally are still deep in the woods, ironically thought one could find reference in documentation to “helping out the community” as a stated benefit of using Open Source...
I think it would make a lot of sense to have some sort of voting system where institutions could propose and vote OSS packages and make grants available while making sure teams worked together.
The team I worked in had for some reason invested in creating a full-fledged python interpreter that loaded CERNs ROOT framework and had that many finicky dependencies that the team just shared an ubuntu image with everything installed. And that was some auxiliary setup, we were building hardware systems for precise timming until the team realized that another team from the same institution was working on a similar problem with 10x the budget.
Grant money for writing things tends to encourage everyone to start their own thing, because having something you own is a good story to tell, it makes you look like a leader (at least in your reports) in a way that contributing bug-fixes to someone else's project simply doesn't. (In commerce it's the other way around, the guy with many clients can split the cost, and thus give more functionality per dollar, and thus out-compete the little guys.)
GP's suggestion of giving end-uses some kind of tickets to distribute to software they use, and then pay its developers, sounds like a smart way to encourage consolidation.
This has provided a specially perverse incentive for people that are involved in both academia and politics.
I know of a certain emeritus professor that was particularly involved in national politics (spain did not have that many engineers 60 years ago), his engineering skills are average at best, since he has spent his whole life working the politics of academia. That said, he had so many titles and awards that just his qualifications earned the company he created a lot of points towards getting substantial grants. The startup has been getting >1M€/year since 2014 from the EU, plus indirect investment from private firms that can claim special benefits. All money they get they “invest” into getting stuff like patents, that allow them to claim IP with made up value.
They actually have a patent for a robot architecture for which there’s no analytic solution to inverse kinematics, meaning that instead of having a trigonometric formula for computing the position of the robot, we had to do an exhaustive search simulating the position of the robot in 3d space until we were close enough.
I started developing what was to be an open source nutritional planning app and found this project (https://www.eurofir.org/) which is apparently funded by heaps of my tax money.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to not be allowed to use that data for public good.
Good news, even if it is only EU parliament.
Edit: one thing i do think will help adoption is credentialed support - so it's pretty obvious I can always find some other company who knows Apache httpd - but far less obvious if I want to use a mid-ranking piece of OSS and if we are having to build our own OSS system (say something to manage building planning permission).
But if there were consortiums of OSS ISPs who could cross certify on a given piece of software it would get over one of the huge if not hugest problem - who do I call if there is a problem and are they credible?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23190447
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
That was not done by request of the technical staff.
As such probably more pragmatic. Also I very, very much agree that if the public is paying for it, it should be published.
I don't think it's a good idea anyway to switch every client over, but it would be nice if governments would consider Linux for servers more. The default assumption of new machine = new windows licence is very wasteful.
If you're a small business and your files are in Microsoft formats and none of the conversion utilities are very good you're in trouble. If you're a government with hundreds of IT staff, you can improve the conversion utilities. You can make "runs on Linux" a requirement for software you buy and be large enough that vendors will port their software to Linux in order to get your business.
That is why Microsoft is so afraid of governments doing this. Because once the conversion utility is improved, it's improved for everyone. Once the vendor takes the time to do a Linux port, it exists for everyone. Which makes it cheaper for other entities to switch to Linux, which causes even more progress in reducing the friction to switching for everyone else.
That's not even mentioning things like the extreme reliance on Microsoft AD.
Step two, you change out the underlying OS and people barely notice because all the applications are the same.
It's true that most brand name consumer software is from (companies headquartered in) America right now, though all of the major companies also have dozens of offices in Europe. (Chrome's V8 was famously written in Denmark, before Google even had an office in that country.) Are you suggesting this could be a response to American companies hiring people in EU countries, but avoiding paying their share of corporate taxes there? That's possible, but it doesn't sound to me like that's the reason.
I think it's at least as likely they're hedging against the different countries in the EU each developing their own (incompatible) software and playing against each other. In politics and business, America tends towards "market will solve all", while the EU tends towards "there's dozens of us so we need to cooperate to get anything done".
Maybe they looked at America and saw it as a cautionary tale. California has a massively disproportionate power over everything related to computers today. Europe has a bit of history with one member state trying to exert a disproportionate power over the rest.
Members of the EU Parliament & Pirates have contributed close to 0 lines of code to OSS. Thank you for your service!
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...
The basis of our arguments is rooted in a new approach of the European Commission manifested in the ambitious agenda that the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen put out in mid-February 2020. The general idea in our action plan is that Europe should play a leadership role in all digital developments. How to do that? The authors of this report are convinced that three bold action plans are required:
Action Plan 1:
European Cloud / European Internet
A European firewall/cloud/ internet would foster a digital ecosystem in Europe based on data and innovation. It would drive competition and set standards, similar to what has happened in China in the past 20 years. The foundations of such a European cloud are democratic values, transparency, competition and data protection.
The thing this refers to - I believe - is among other things GAIA-X: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
Yeah, the communists were telling us that for 40 years. Words don't always match the reality, especially when someone is plainly talking about stuff like transparency and democratic values (what does that even mean in the context of an Internet firewall?).
You haven't put forward any arguments that supports your position though. You mentioned unrelated things. This is not a paper from the Chinese government or a communist party so why should. That kind of reasoning is a slippery slope in my opinion.
“Zensursula is the online nickname given to Ursula von der Leyen, the former German Minister for Family Affairs who came under media scrutiny in 2009 for her strong advocacy of censorship laws against online content that may be deemed "inappropriate" by the federal government, especially on the issue of child pornography.”
“In January 2009, Germany's Federal Ministry of Family Affairs launched the first government initiative towards more strict censorship of child pornography on the Internet. Formally known as the Access Impediment Act, it was drafted under the leadership of the Family Affairs minister Ursula von der Leyen[1], one of the staunchest advocates of Internet censorship in the federal government.”
“The Act proposed a mandatory blockage of online child pornography by Internet service providers through a blacklist of illegal websites maintained by the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (BKA). In the following days, the legislative proposal sparked a political debate among German Internet users about whether the state may or should have an infrastructure to censor the internet.”
“While the initiative was mostly geared towards taboo topics like terrorism and child pornography, the scope of online debate became focused on general censorship of content on the web. Due to her vocal support of the censorship laws, the critics dubbed the Family Affairs minister "Zensursula," a portmanteau of the German word "Zensur" (Censorship) and her first name "Ursula." The nickname quickly gave way to a slew of parodies including original songs and remixes.”
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zensursula
That does not mean that the intention is to copy China, but it does indicate her propensity to favor limiting access to information by the general population.
This study does not express the intent of the EU or the European Parliament, but is the opinion of their authors, all working for the same company (Future Candy).
"DISCLAIMER AND COPYRIGHT The opinions expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the European Parliament."