Europen Union creates Fedora-based Linux distribution for the public sector | Hacker News Reader

Europen Union creates Fedora-based Linux distribution for the public sector

linuxjournal.com

35 pointstodsacerdoti14 comments

The headline suggest this is something official from the EU (commission) which it is currently not.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43468785

This also doesn't have the sort of language I'd expect from a project associated with the EU ('supported by', 'views do not necessarily reflect those of the EU', etc), which is what signaled to me that it wasn't official. Even calling it a 'community-led initiative' seems to me to risk misinterpretation, in potentially suggesting that it is some sort of EU initiative that is community-led, when it in fact appears to simply be a group of people and not associated with EU institutions at all.

It does have a logo, however, which seems to be extremely important for EU-associated projects.

To be abundantly clear, this is one guy’s pet project. So far there’s a website and nothing else (I guess in that sense it could masquerade as an EU project). Even calling it a “community-driven project” is way overselling it at this point.

Flagged for clickbait.

Given the trade war, and the lack of non-American software companies I'd love to see encouragement of open source to replace Microsoft/Oracle/Salesforce etc etc. Its a good time to force privacy laws or even bans on Meta/X/Google as well.

Here are more details about the "proof of concept": https://eu-os.gitlab.io/goals#from-home

This seems to be more about Linux deployment in big organizations, they say goal isn't to develop yet another distro.

The FAQ mentions no name of any involved person, which leaves me slightly suspicious, and the adoption of RedHat-based Fedora remains unexplained goal rather than result of some analysis against a list of project requirements.

The front page has a footer that names a single individual, and links to their personal site which feels a little less suspicious.

Fedora would seem to be an unusual choice given its 6 month lifecycle, and I would have expected an EU-based distro to use something like OpenSUSE.

EU-origin software used by EU public sector:

https://www.secunet.com/en/products-consulting/sina

> The first building block was securely encrypted communication via the internet, followed by secure laptops for government employees. Today, SINA forms an integrated ecosystem of applications, computers, network encryption and a cloud platform. With over 250,000 active devices, SINA has established itself as the de facto standard in the German federal administration.

https://cyberus-technology.de/en/products/hypervisor

> Our open-source Hypervisor is built on proven components, such as Linux, KVM and Cloud Hypervisor.. Cyberus Hypervisor is built with security as a first-class citizen. We use memory-safe languages, provide a high-level API to build secure compartments and make sure you never have to deal with those CVEs.

I wonder why not SUSE/openSUSE?

Why? There already is https://clip-os.org/en/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu and https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... and probably several dozen more.

https://www.univention.com 's UCS comes to mind, too.

Interesting choice to base it on a US distro like Fedora instead of OpenSUSE, and hosting the project on gitlab which is a US based company as well...

wrong. It’s wrong choice for sure.

This is one guy's project with extremely misleading branding that suggests it's an official EU project.

It certainly succeeded in misleading the public, as evidenced by the amount of publicity it received.

Not officially “from the EU” so they have their work cut out for them. If they have clear goals and push hard for several years though, they may succeed - and now is certainly the time with digital sovereignty firmly in the zeitgeist.

And if they don’t.. https://xkcd.com/927/

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