Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

nlnet.nl

473 pointsedent228 comments

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.

Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon.

As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).

>As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this.

I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies.

The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time.

I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere.

A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.

And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.

If it’s government owned/controlled it will be much, much worse than Microsoft (purely from the product quality perspective)

Uh? Why? You think that government employees are genetically stupid?

Companies that don’t have to compete have no incentives to make good products. Especially when high level government officials (i.e. people controlling their funding) are their clients and jot end consumers. Wasting time/resources to make good products under such circumstances would be quite stupid.

Of course same often applies to large enterprise corporation but thankfully at least occasionally they can go bankrupt (which keeps them in line to some extent).

Your religious faith in the perfect market is a dangerous cult. I hope you can seek help at some point.

What perfect market? What is that even supposed to mean..

And?

> A new system vendor needs to be created

If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.

Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.

Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.

> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress

Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.

True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.

> most progress

Well most progress in computing, software and related areas did come from private companies.

> True free market competition creates monopolies and

That’s where regulation must come in. To stop monopolies from forming or at least from abusing their position.

Anyway your suggestion is to jump straight to the monopoly phase?

There is an uncomfortable truth to reconcile with in that the vast majority of technological progress in private companies has come from monopolistic ones.

True, yet those major tech companies are still incentivized to make good products to some extent if they want to remain monopolies longterm. Just look at Intel..

If you have the government forcing everyone to buy your products regardless of their quality you have no such incentives.

The Internet came from the military originally, the Web came from CERN, many advances in programming languages (like automatic garbage collection) came from academia, and so on. Your claim about where most progress came from isn't obviously true.

And to the extent that it might be true, to what extent is that just structural? In a society with a focus on free markets, more will come from free markets, naturally.

> Internet came from the military originally, the Web came from CERN,

That’s certainly true, yet 90-99% (exact percentage is debatable) of progress came from non government funded organizations.

> extent is that just structural

Generally human behavior is driven by competition. That applies to individuals (e.g. scientists) even if they work in the public sector. Large government organizations or monopolies have no such incentives.

> Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress.

Source: "100 things that never happened"

Or the majority of human history..

But of course it depends on how you define “free market competition” (markets are very rarely even close to being free without significant regulation). Entities which end up “winning” almost inevitably do their utmost to restrict any competition which leads to stagnation.

I dunno if that many Nobel prizes are being awarded to people working for private companies.

But yes, you're right, a government monopoly where there isn't a natural monopoly isn't a good plan. Funding a whole bunch of small projects might be quite a good plan, though. Sort of like angel investment.

I don’t know if that many Nobel prizes were rewarded to any anyone working on software or even computing in general.

The current NGI program (“Next Generation Internet“), of which NLNet is a participant of, is part of the Horizon Europe EU level program with a (fixed) runtime from 2021-2027.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Europe

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors

Google's Android is the largest OS by usage.

But yes, you're right. When you try to use a non-US OS in France you end up buying US hardware and erasing your data on the next LineageOS release.

We need vendors.

>Google's Android is the largest OS by usage.

I am primarily thinking about government institutions and corporations. There Microsoft is used almost everywhere.

Mobile phones are a secondary issue in my opinion, also because Android is already much more open than Windows.

There's an attempt to move away from Microsoft enterprise tools, e.g. 365+ ecosystem.

See opendesk.eu , it's a platform collaborating with many EU open-source developers, and it's funded primarily by the German government.

> 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.

This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.

I think that is a question of architecture.

What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.

Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful.

Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.

Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.

Microsoft has a terrible history of integration even among it's own products and has forced obsoletion throughout. If it's literally you only have a single vendor to pay then you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy.

You can't on the one hand maintain the myth that there will somehow be private competition but then on the other set the barriers so high that only the largest most entrenched monopolies can succeed.

> you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy

Er, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?

No organisation of any size buys everything from one vendor though. Microsoft dominates desktops, but Apple and Google dominate mobile devices, an organisation might have Oracle databases running on Linux servers on top of that, some SaaS suppliers, some desktop software suppliers....

But still - think how much more you'd need to buy and validate it all works together. Microsoft gives you AD, which works with Outlook, Sharepoint, Azure, Office365, Teams, then all of those, plus Excel, Word, Powerpoint all bundled, and not for very much money.

True, but it varies depending on how well those fit your organisation's needs whether buying into the full bundle is what you want to do. The less of it you want, the less the advantage.

Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.

I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.

Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases.

If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.

Not really.

The end user devices are Windows 11, we use M365, but government services are mostly homegrown and the infrastructure runs on Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (Openshift) software.

Replacing Windows 11 with some kind of Linux and M365 by an MTA is technically feasible, there is political momentum building against US-centric services, but here in Europe politicians are historically highly suspicious of technicians, so nothing gets done yet.

It's a rich country, COTS replaced a lot of technical excellence, but the trend can be reversed as we have bright engineers on the inside still.

In poorer countries and regions, the engineering excellence is way better and they are much more independent.

I'm also working on a government institute, but unlike you, we're absolutely owned by Microsoft. Disruptions to that relationship could be existential threats, which is why (slow) movement has started on detaching from them.

Yep years ago I was a palm-os dev and worked for cities. One government offical told us to switch to windows mobile, because "no one ever got fired buying microsoft"

RedHat and SuSe do compete there.

This doesn’t seem right. What is Microsoft supplying? Windows which is used almost exclusively to access some web service CRUD form. All of these services are made by third party vendors. Any number of OSes could do that from linux based or ChromeOS or MacOS… probably even iOS. There are some legacy win desktop apps that are slowly getting replaced or they are run in VMs.

The Microsoft servers are most likely azure running linux. Thats quite possible to replace by any number of vendors.

The main MOAT microsoft has are the contacts and the lobby. There always is some politician around fighting for Microsoft because they like Outlook more than Thunderbird.

It’s also reason why i think they will keep their dominant position. Even though the idea they provide something rare is increasingly more untrue.

> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you

While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?

Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.

Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.

Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.

> Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.

The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.

I agree, and I'm not sure whether the reason it hasn't happened is that they can't do it, or they won't do it.

These are not mutually exclusive.

Nokia and the rest of the Symbian ecosystem actually led the market by a long stretch, just a short while ago. If they hadn't hired a former Microsoft exec to lead the company, and perhaps with a bit of luck, Nokia/Siemens/etc would have been that alternative. But that is another discussion.

I 100% disagree, and that's as someone who was both a fan of Nokia and even of Windows Phone.

And even if I agreed, they did hire that former MS exec. So they wouldn't have been that alternative, because in no universe would Apple or Google put Stephen Elop in charge of iPhone/Android, and in this universe, Nokia would.

> The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.

Time travel is a simple and elegant solution to many problems. (Ignoring unintended consequences at least.)

True, but we always have the opportunity to eliminate a similar need for time travel 40 years from now.

I think there could be a big market for a hosting+support provider that manages the patchwork of open source business applications. Once that's set up, the organization could spend money on the development of the systems they're hosting.

I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.

I'm halfway there with Communick. I started with the focus on providing hosting for social media and messaging platforms, so I had to find my way around setting up LDAP for SSO, provisioning of object storage for separate services, etc.

But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).

On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.

Isn't that essentially just any existing systems integrator? There's plenty of those that are non-American.

That aside, governments have the resources to do this themselves, that's how they currently do so. Extending those services to local organisations would be a step in the right direction.

The thing about services and tooling is that for many orgs, there's not a whole lot you need, and once you're at a scale where you need tooling to manage that scale, you presumably have the resources for an operations team to deal with that, and can outsource the bits you can't do.

The org I work for outsources our public-facing website work to a web-design co, because that's their speciality, and not ours.

All of that is to say; I agree with you, but I think they already exist in the form of SIs.

> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?

There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?

Yes. If you want your vendors to interop with each other in any way, it's the same n^2 lines of communication problem you have in dev teams. In fact, it's worse, because the vendors are antagonistic towards each other - it's in their interests that you ditch some of the others and give more of your business to them.

That depends on the vendor. Small vendors know that they can't do everything and are happy they are part of the pie. Medium sized often dream of getting big and so if they think they can by taking a large slice they will.

It also depends on how your relationship is structured and what you demand. I work for a very large company, but some of our customers won't even look at us until we pass a third party interoperability certification, and thus getting that certification becomes critical to us even though most customers don't care. Once we are certified interoperability issues are rare (they happen all the time because of the sear number of customers, but most of the time things just work because everyone is following the standard). The standard and certification has been refined over a couple decades now and so most of the things that can go wrong either are either updated in the standard and certification test; or they are at least tribal knowledge of "don't do that it won't work"

Sometimes one large corporation feels like working with multiple smaller vendors. Products are too siloed and don't work together the way they claim, etc.

> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you.

This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.

> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.

> Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.

Dear god no. That's how you end up with contracts assigned to "Joe's Nephew Software Design" that don't just smell but reek of nepotism (although I will admit, the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better), neverending GDPR et al. compliance issues, and massive employee overhead in training and onboarding costs when every local government does its own shit and economies of scale can't be leveraged.

Also, even assuming "Joe's Nephew Software Design" manages to complete the DMV software on time and in budget... who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates? It's (way) easier and cheaper to do continuous maintenance when there are lots of clients to fund upkeep, compared to just one.

> the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better.

You said it yourself. Corruption and abuse of power will always exist. But if I had to choose between the invisible corruption of faceless bureaucrats enabling cronies or the local crook who will try to put his finger on the pie, I will take the local crook every time. At the very least, I can get a bunch of people and bang on their doors with some pitchforks.

> who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates?

We are taking about a scenario where open source is the norm and the stakes for each individual project are lower. "off-the-shelf" components would be the norm. Whatever customization or improvements done by the departments would also be released as FOSS.

> At the very least, I can get a bunch of people and bang on their doors with some pitchforks.

For that, you gotta hear about the issue first. Local reporting is all but dead, and the few local journalists that remain and have the expertise and time to do investigative pieces on local money wastes are way more easily silenced by SLAPP lawsuits and political pressure (up to and including death threats) than something like, say, the New York Times.

But if we are talking about local services and the governance of projects at the municipal/county level, you won't need to wait for reporters. You will quickly see and experience the mismanagement of resources.

God, the idea of microservices for humans is nightmare time. I work for a company that runs micorservices, and I can say I've spent days attempting to get everything running on my dev system. One upgrade and I can watch my whole day/week disappear into config hell.

I can't imagine how hard it would be to do this with people. Each working with their own little bubble.

Just the other week someone decided that an api needed a tweak, so they adjusted the code and the tests, but missed one external system. Took 4 days to fix, because we couldn't figure out what had changed. And the team who owned the external system wasn't around. People as microservices.. no just no.

If doing your own work requires you to "get everything running on your dev system", are you really working on a service-oriented architecture or was it that your company decided to board the bandwagon and botched the execution?

> people as microservices

No, departments as microservices.

> the idea of microservices for humans is nightmare time.

Works for supermarkets, department stores etc. Companies employ too much red tape in their acquisition processes.

I’ve seen organisations pay way over the going rate for cloud services by insisting on a bidding process and talking to salespeople, when they could have just purchased direct from the console.

The EU could set up something publicly run at first, creating (software) contracts which let chunks of the system get run by small, focused, competitive European businesses who could focus on, say, running a data center in France, providing blob storage services, managed Postgres or whatever...

But the issue with many small corporations is that you can not run office IT like that. People buy from Microsoft because you can get all in one from them. If you do not compete with that, then you aren't competing at all.

That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together.

The EU government can provide that.

That would not only compete with Microsoft it could harness the power of small business/startup competition for the individual components which Microsoft can't do.

Japanese keiretsu are a good model to follow here. It was a network of small businesses each of whom held shares in related companies, centered around a bank that provided financing. It was responsible for Japan's economic miracle.

China also did something quite similar which is why they are absolutely dominant in electronics manufacturing.

The EU government doesn't appear willing to do anything like this though. I think they'd rather just get sweet talked by SAP into funneling taxpayer cash into their coffers.

> That was my whole point. These services can all individually be provided by small businesses but there needs to be an overarching organization that links it all together and creates an abstraction people can use that centralizes billing, discovery and links everything together.

This is legitimately a really good suggestion.

There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them.

Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.

I don't think administrative work needs any killer applications. You need a complete system which actually works together and can be sourced by a single vendor.

You're assuming that people want to switch but I'm talking about the incentives for end consumers to switch. There has to be some strong motivation for switching, and it's not only going to be GUI design. Something about a new OS must be really desirable, either the hardware it's running on or better applications.

I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.

>You're assuming that people want to switch

No, I am not. That is the stance of the EU. Switching is a matter of European security.

What "people" want is already irrelevant and whether the GUI is consistent or not couldn't matter less.

> What "people" want is already irrelevant

This! Software is stuck in some illusory ideal from the dotcom days, a global market of meritous choice. It's long been political and about sovereignty, control and security. Some comments above sing the praises of Adobe as a "no alternative" software. So, remember that time when Trump passed an executive order banning Adobe in South American countries [0]?

The US does not get to use access to tech as a weapon, so they're not good enough by wider criteria in a changing political world. It doesn't matter how good are products by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta...

I also happen to think they're technically inferior to a diverse inter-compatible and free ecosystem, but that's becoming a side show.

In a way its good that there are no European vendors. The coming change cannot be mistaken for trade preference. People are being "forced to be free" of dangerous influence [1].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49973337

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/

Oh well, that was a misunderstanding. If people are forced to use a new OS whether they want it or not, then of course any Linux distro will do and there is hardly any need for a new OS, let alone one that the EU has developed.

I was assuming, in the context of the original post, that the EU lacks in innovation with regards to operating systems and tried to explain why it is hard to innovate in this area because of the application barrier and due to the fact that viable alternatives like Linux aren't competitive enough.

I would claim that many people would be fine using something else because they use 30% of the features of the respective applications.

They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!

As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.

They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.

However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.

Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.

Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].

Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."

Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.

[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.

> but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].

Ah photoshop. Every municipality employee uses photoshop at least 5h a day!

I'm not sure I agree with Adobe design suite being needed. I am a close to someone who's been through multiple different public sector institutions in my country and the only true constants is the cord Microsoft Office suite (Word+Excel+PowerPoint), Outlook and more recently Adobe Acrobat (mostly because of digital signing) and Microsoft Teams.

The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.

LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.

Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features. Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).

Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.

People complained about the ribbon and how hard it was to learn/use when it first came out, now 18 years latter (some people reading this were not even born when it was introduced!) it is the default and nobody talks about those issues anymore. They will learn LibreOffice if they are told they must - they will complain but people always complain about change.

The issue with the Adobe suites is that their alternatives need to be workflow-identical, it's not just how good or bug compatible the competitor needs to be.

The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.

They do not have to be workflow identical. They just need to be equivalent. I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time. However if the new workflow is worse (slower, worse results, or other such negatives) that will be found out.

Now it will take power users several years to learn all the tricks of the new workflow and that is productivity lost in the short term. This alone may not be worth the cost. If the new workflow is better though it will be worth it.

> I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time.

And this is why a Photoshop user won't move to a new suite of tools.

There are actually quite some projects named in the article that are moving in on Adobe turf:

- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941) - PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media - and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS

And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...

So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.

The vast majority of users do not use Adobe at all. The vast majority of users don't need anything complex out of their office suite. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of users.

If you are a large organization you tell the printing press manufacture to fix their bugs or you will find a different vendor. You can even do this if the bug is proved to be in your software not the press. You and I do not have this power, but governments are that big (your company also might be).

Microsoft's push to the cloud and subscriptions for core stuff... outlook, word, excel, is so bizarre and filled with hubris.

An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.

That's a good step. And a there are vendors supporting Linux.

You can be sure such vendors would firm that up with a government sized buy.

Linux support is flawless, as long as you select supported components. And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.

>An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.

No. There is no vendor for this. Such a vendor would need to offer and support everything that MS is offering and supporting.

>And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.

Integration is hard. It needs to work together. We all know that Linux has some rough edges (and so does Windows) and the vendor has to take care of it all and actually needs to fix it. A company like that has to suddenly do maintenance on many major open source projects.

> No. There is no vendor for this.

You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?

My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.

>You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?

Because there seems to be no alternative.

> seems to be no alternative

That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.

I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.

Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.

In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.

50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.

I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.

I don't particularly care.

This is not a nice to have. It is about European security.

I think we agree. But security is also very much about examining assumptions.

It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.

Just ask for their certification? Almost every distro that's big enough to need an org to maintain it, has a professional certification program.

>> hundreds of companies, but which are good?

most of them, since there is a lot of competition. Competition is good for businesses.

There are many vendors. There are no vendors large enough to handle it at government scale, but there are many vendors. If someone was serious about wanting a vendor it wouldn't be hard to become the single vendor. It isn't hard to hire a bunch of technical people, training them on whatever new desktop and set them loose - it is just expensive.

> An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.

What are the equivalents of Active Directory and the likes of Group Policy? I've seen some compatible/similar tools (like FreeIPA), but they don't seem very popular.

Edit: that’s not a gotcha question or something, I’m genuinely curious about the experiences of people who’ve done deployments like that. I also remember trying to setup Samba to allow some Windows PCs to access storage shares on a Linux box and nothing wanted to work with no obvious error messages. Oh and I have no love for the likes of Kerberos either.

There are no equivalents that encompass the technologies and ease of deployment and management for on-prem.

Samba works just fine as a file server. I'm sure there's some intuitive GUI out there (like Synology's) that makes it easy to set up as a file server only. Not sure about a DC.

But even Microsoft wants you to move to Azure AD + InTune. Arguably more secure and flexible.

I haven't done it, but Ansible would be the equivalent to group policies, no? The learning curve is very different though.

You can use Samba and Kerberos for identity management. But again, very different to use.

> 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.

I think that's good. It prevents forming monopolies and makes use of open standards more often.

> The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.

its also very little compared with how much they spend on US suppliers.

It also does not address the issue of private sector dependence on the US.

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system

What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

>What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

The complete package. Hardware, software and ecosystem by a single company. Only Microsoft and Google have anything coming close to this.

Organisations are unlikely to rely only on Apple Software though.

Most organisations do not use MS or Google hardware though.

MS can provide everything for a standard office desktop, but the real strength of their OS is the availability of lots of third party software.

Don't forget enterprise management. Windows makes it easy to maintain a fleet of endpoints much easier than MacOS or Linux.

I'm confused about this assertion. Managing fleets of thousands of Linux machines via declarative role-based configuration management is completely normal. Linux also has a way better story with updates that activate instantly (occasionally requiring 10s to reboot for a kernel update) with easy rollbacks if something goes wrong (e.g. nixos).

What exactly does Windows have that makes it easier to manage machines?

> What exactly does Windows have that makes it easier to manage machines?

A large marketing budget and sysadmin / devops outreach in a way that no single and all Linux distributions collectively haven't matched. Integration of things into a cohesive single tool instead of a grab bag of tools that move from hyped to normal to unmaintained in a number of years.

But on the application server side, Linux is extremely popular. Config management via some tool like ansible or puppet is a table stakes skill in that space. Likewise with some kind of ldap based config for users. I would actually be surprised if someone said they did "devops" and they meant they managed anything with Windows. Typically that's "IT", but I don't understand why.

KDE is also an obviously more "professional"/"serious" desktop environment that just makes it easy to open the tools to do work without a bunch of crap to turn off and without pointless UI churn requiring people to relearn how to use it. As far as bugs go, Windows IME has to be rebooted around 80% of the time after sleeping because either the WSL driver crashes or the VPN enters a permanently locked up state. I've had the start menu just stop responding to clicks when everything else is working normally. The thing is wonky as hell, and usually needs to be rebooted via the "hold power for 10s" method (do normal people even know about that?). I never run into issues on Linux (Fedora or Nixos).

The UI is also trash. e.g. if you type "reboot" or "restart" in the start menu (a common need, per above), it doesn't find the command you obviously want to run (KDE does for both), and it hides the (unlabeled pictograph) button you'd need to click to find it, requiring you to close the menu and re-open it. Nothing is organized anymore, so you need to rely on search, but search doesn't even work.

None of that matters to companies who want to hire an offshore tech to click things in the MMC and maybe write a Powershell script to solve something really quick. Especially small companies who can't afford an entire IT department.

All of the Linux management tools are good, but they do not integrate as tightly with the OS and there are several competing ones. Microsoft has one tool and one thing to learn and that's it.

I say this as someone who has managed a fleet of Linux systems and whose current work is 100% Linux based. If a company can throw a smaller amount of money at something then they'll do it

Windows: I can pay a low skilled admin who knows how to run prebuilt tools

Linux: I require a higher skilled admin who knows how to architect and build things

Because Linux has been built by developers for developers, it eschews braindead administration as a feature, because that's not something its dev community ever required.

That's changed somewhat in the past 15 years, but still lags Windows substantially.

Yes, and the low skill, low pay admin is what many companies are looking for, at least for their desktop/notebook fleet.

Server-side, it's almost all Linux

KDE has a better UI and probably works better for end users, but Windows has centralised management tools that are already deployed and lots of people know.

While that’s sure nice to have as a customer, I fail to see how it is strategically relevant to the EU to have something similar here. I’d value a functioning, open, and compatible ecosystem of European software much more.

I agree. Get rid of reliance on any one supplier. Open makes it easier for everyone to contribute. The UK, or India, or the US, or anywhere.

Then I think that you would probably need to create some sort of centralized European FOSS software support, because in the ideal case that everything was interoperable without too much work, you're left with 20 different software projects to get in contact with if something goes wrong. And if something goes wrong in the interop between those 20 projects written on wildly different stacks, there's nobody to call.

If some genius hasn't already put together a turnkey umbrella project that meets your needs, you're going to have to find your own genius. That's different than just calling MS or Apple, even if their support is slow or annoying. I think Oracle counts, too.

It's not like Europe couldn't build these systems out of FOSS (just like Oracle and others, btw), they just haven't done it until now and it would have been just as easy to do 15 years ago. I think they'd rather get courted and bribed by American behemoths.

Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

I'm an embedded firmware dev, so admittedly I am dealing with an entirely different list of vendors and asking for different things than the typical sysadmin or devops type.

With that said, it has certainly not been my experience that "having someone to call" actually solves my problems all that often. It's occasionally a nice to have, but normally I am reluctant to even start the process because my experience has been that it is usually a net drain on my time and energy to do so.

At this point, I am far more concerned with having access to source code so that I have a fighting chance of creating a workaround for myself, and failing that I don't want to contact my vendor so much as I want to replace them.

> Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

It might often have low practical value, but usually high CYA value.

What I'm seeing is more and more web based systems. My kids school is completely browser based. Nothing is installed beyond the browser. Same for the teachers, it's all web based.

That said, I love apple. Nothing else works like their hardware. It's not the best by a long shot, but I'm still able to use a mac-pro 8 years on. And my iphone is 7 years old (for me) and I got it used.

you should start teaching him before he thinks ^above^ is normal, rather than most conveinient for the school, let him know he will have superpowers.

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.

KDE Plasma is actually in the list...

And I'll be happy to see Dolphin get decent keyboard navigation.

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.

If you have 100M I'll create a company to setup and maintain infrastructure. Though depending on your size I might need more money to maintain yours. Setting up the company isn't hard.

What is hard is doing it today. It will take a year just to figure out the various custom configurations you need to get a majority of users switched over without issue, and there will be a long tail weird cases that will go on for years before everything is done. This isn't unusual - the simpler case of switching my college campus from Coke to Pepsi took over a month and there both vendors cooperated in making it a smooth switch (Coke does not want to burn bridges as this happens all the time and they want to be back again next time the contract comes up - right now Microsoft doesn't have that incentive)

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...

LibreOffice/Collabora online could work for #3.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/

Surely the government should be running their own hardware and doing their own software updates. Lots of governments in Europe have had success with using Linux to do this.

They gotta start somewhere, no? It is going to be extremely difficult (maybe even close to impossible) to dislodge the incumbents, doesn't mean they shouldn't try

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...

I'm sure a centrally planned initiative will beat the market and create a better product for you to use in Europe, just like Lada defeated Ford!

Exactly. Just like Airbus can't compete with the likes of Boeing.

Well. At least airbus dosent drop out of the skies, or loose emergency doors out of the blue.

constantcrying's comment may be meant with sarcasm because Airbus leads Boeing in market share in addition to having fewer models with explosive decompression issues...

It doesn't need to be better, it just needs to be good enough that certain features can pull users away from the incumbent (thus applying pressure to them).

looks at the American health care system

The issues with the American health care system are conceptually simple: (1) too much complexity (creates as ossified system that cannot be changed), (2) as a consequence of the above, too little pricing transparency (everything is a bespoke party:party contract and/or state-specific market/regulation), & (3) therefore too little actual competition at key points.

If it were forced to simplify, competition would take care of many of the ills.

It certainly won't beat the market in what the market optimizes for -- namely risk adjusted return on capital. It probably won't beat the market on the implicitly coupled metric of "value delivered to customers" either.

The trick here is that "users" and "customers" have become all but totally decoupled when it comes to the modern internet. Not enough people were willing to pay, so the market has turned to other sources of revenue.

I share your skepticism about bureaucratic government agencies creating value, and doubly so when it comes to technology. At the same time, as an individual voter I am beginning to question whether "the market" is optimizing for the same things that I value.

Perhaps there is a natural conflict between maximizing utility for the majority of people vs maximizing utility for the majority of capital.

I am not advocating for central planning. As I underscored in my comment, I advocate for something closer to the defense procurement model: where the market is failing to provide an appropriate off the shelf product and the state contracts an entity (usually a private company, but in the case of software it could be a public agency) to make it for them. This is a model that is currently in use in the US, in the EU, and actually worked well in the USSR too, their Ladas (and consumer products in general) might have been terrible but their defense industry was great.

The USSR defense industry also funded multiple OKBs that would compete with each other for projects.

In the EU's case, multi-party competitive bidding, with the winner taking the prime slot and others being assigned modular chunks of the product, sounds attractive.

Specifically, with the stipulation that results would be used as a criteria in future bids.

tl;dr -- Use the pyramid league system (e.g. from football) with promotion and relegation to efficiently create industry competition. Fuck up too many projects, down the pyramid you go.

Sounds good to me. I am not too dogmatic about the exact implementation of who does the work and your system seems to align incentives properly while also avoiding the too many cooks in the pot/too much dilution of the money into small projects to have an impact issues.

From past failures the 2 things I want to be addressed are: 1) Have a proper procurement agency with actual experts at the helm, they are the "customer", they hand over the bids, they measure success, they should of course listen to end users. 2) Shield the project from petty internal politics. While I understand that political interference is inevitable, especially if you get public funding. The top priority is to have a good alternative to existing software in these 3 categories I defined. Not yet another job program/kickback to politically well connected entities.

The typical reason for poor procurement outcomes is the who-watches-the-watchers-ad-infinitum problem.

At stake: huge amounts of money

Naturally, people will go to great lengths to try and obtain that, by influencing the key decision makers.

So you put in a layer above the decision makers.

So they influence the layer above the decision makers.

Repeat-repeat.

The only true defense against corruption, at scale, is competition. Because then everyone tries to knife each other in the back, and it generally zero-sums.

We already have all of those things as open source projects, just get them to fund the existing solutions to get them functionally better than Apple/Microsoft.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is definitely the wrong approach with the Linux ecosystem, and any other open source ecosystem. Not all distros actually have a single parent company, or any parent company, many are volunteer only but accept donations.

The right approach would be for the laptop vendor to test their laptops with distros requested by their customers, and to contribute new drivers and fixes to the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream projects, and to require their chip suppliers to do the same. The revenue sharing could be via an official partnership, or conference/etc sponsorship arrangements or even just regular donations.

The OS selection would probably have to be hidden behind an "advanced community supported options" area, to reduce the confusion you mention.

Some great initiatives being funded, especially: >PeerTube for Institutions — Make PeerTube easier to manage and moderate at scale

I'd LOVE to see more institutions and NGOs move to PeerTube.

The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary, part of the well funded Wikimedia that spends over a quarter of its budget on "Building analytics and ML services" https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

> The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary

Seems like a well-specified and specific reason for the funding though, not just "do whatever you want":

> This project will develop QA modules for Wiktionary, leading to easy parsing and processing of cross-linguistic data. This helps to unify data formats across Wiktionary, and improve the overall reliability of this invaluable resource.

Given that the EU has 24 official languages, I think it makes a lot of sense to try to contribute resources for improving cross-linguistic data, bonus points for funneling those resources to a relatively open platform.

TIL to my surprise that Wikimedia has an Enterprise, which serves big customers like Google. We monetise what you crowdsource to us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Wikimedia...

Motis (transit calculator), Clearance (OSM contribution analysis) and StreetComplete (OSM contribution gamified) : very important assets for the free mapping community. Good news !

Thanks! Maintainer of MOTIS here. We're planning to bring support for NeTEx, SIRI and OJP to MOTIS and with those formats a lot of features that are only available with those formats but not with GTFS(-RT) (yet). But having them implemented will also help us to quickly activate them for GTFS(-RT) once GTFS(-RT) gains support.

There is also a lot of indirect funding in the form of the governments purchasing habits: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-s...

In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.

I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.

Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.

Actually, the grant process at NLnet is supposed super light weight. It consists of a single short form (https://nlnet.nl/propose) with very little boilerplate. No consultants needed...

Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.

My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.

That is very true. Budget is something that most organisations are fairly bad at. So it does make a lot of sense for e.g. the European Commission to work with organisations like NLnet that do get it.

The application process is pretty easy. I applied a couple of years ago. I did take it seriously, but I probably should have put more time and effort into my message and presentation.

What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.

Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.

> I like the publicly funded open source funding in theory, in practice I suspect these guys had to pay consultants to create a funding project application, that went through some arbitrary agency, and the money that got to the developers is probably less than half of the money that was spent in the process. And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

I agree that systems are far from perfect at the time. I also think that governments have been putting money into digital tech for much less time than private enterprise.

Regarding the money that gets to the developers, I added a comment on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770310

> And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.

Agreed, but keep in mind this must be compared to the phenomenal inefficiency of the developing monopolist oligarchy to the end user. I find it interesting how much harsher people are when some fraction of government money is siphoned, when the current alternative is *most* of it being siphoned, albeit without passing through government first.

The implicit claim often seems to be that people see less value per dollar when money passes through the government. But this is pure nonsense, particularly when you compare things like the cost of healthcare in the US vs everywhere else. Or generally most cases where government managed services can be compared to consolidated markets.

Just because some government money is wasted in ways that are less applicable to private industry doesn't at all mean the private industry creates more value for the consumer.

Except for the fact that big consultancies who receive most of the government contracts, have zero contribution to the open source ecosystem.

When you pay 1000 USD to Microsoft to use o365, how much of that goes to the developers?

The argument of "but very little of that money will go to *actual* development" is not looking at the alternative being used now.

>>In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP.

That's a terrifying statistic. It doesn't sound very sustainable.

In the US it's 40%. The 10% difference is explained by the US having limited to no public healthcare or pensions. Those are largely paid for privately, which pretty much balances it out.

I see no mention of the core projects which have been maintained and being used for decades. xz, libexpat, openzfs, NetworkManager and way too many tiny projects which glue the entire linux system. That's how you start to reclaim the open internet. Where is pihole, who is trying to debloat the web? Where is dnsmasq, which is most widely used dns server?

The sovereign tech fund is doing precisely that: Funding critical infrastructure projects. NLnet is also helping in the effort as far as i'm aware, as are some other organizations. Even some companies are chipping in. There is of course always a lot left to do.

From the looks of it, it doesn't seem enough. EU just doesn't have enough money to make this all viable. US is the only country with enough funding resources for quite a lot of critical and over-looked projects

Governments employ millions of people, money is absolutely not a limitation.

Also: who is working to usurp the free web and bloat it further. Examples being: DoH, cert-pinning, VMs inside apps (TikTok) and those advertising ID things that Google and Mozilla pushed.

Cloudflare?

They did provide funding to dnsmasq: https://nlnet.nl/bluehatsprize/2024/1.html

And DNSvizor: https://nlnet.nl/project/DNSvizor

> They did provide funding to dnsmasq: https://nlnet.nl/bluehatsprize/2024/1.html

You just reminded me that I need to make a donation to `dnsmasq`. I rely on it every single day (including for a couple critical projects and it has never failed me) and I’ve yet to donate anything to the project. I feel a bit guilty about that!

You are not the worst. There are people who take OSS for granted and demand absolutely ridiculous things from the maintainers as if they owe them something

NLnet is a great initiative. Among the numerous projects they have supported is Marginalia [1] search engine.

1. https://www.marginalia.nu/

"NLnet is a great initiative"

Originally, NLNet was *private money* given by the founders of a dutch ISP¨.

Now that this private money run out, they made a partnership with the European Commission, which is *public money* and comes with more strings attached.

That all sounds like it's meant to sound sinister, but why? Private individuals sometimes fund great initiatives, as do public organisations. What's your concern?

Both have their ups and downs, but broadly speaking, private money tends to be a lot more flexible and risk-liberal, whereas public money can be like having the worst aspects of the ignorant absentee CEOs-golf-buddy manager and the micromanaging hands-on desperate-to-prove-himself CEOs-nephew manager.

Public money is eventually traced back to some elected official who has absolutely nothing to do with technology but is also very emotionally-invested in showing to the constituents that the money isn't being wasted - to the point where spending the money on something useless but concrete ("ergonomic" coffee mugs) might be deemed preferable to a long-term investment that falls on the wrong side of a term-limit.

Again, public money can be fine and completely no-strings sometimes (and, conversely, private charitable contributions can sometimes end up with plenty of strings too), but there's certainly reasons to point out the differences.

Mastodon is another one (ActivityPub / Feediverse)

https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon/

I previously received funding from nlnet and they have been great to work with. I highly recommend working with them, and they have been supporting amazing projects!

I’m curious what kind of strings came with the funding, and what kind of oversight contracts you had to sign.

No strings at all. Oversight: the way it worked is that you agree on a proposal and milestones. When a milestone is complete you present it to them and then they pay for that part of the agreement.

If memory serves making it easy and accessible was one of their main goals, and they indeed lived up to it.

Thanks for the follow up that’s good to hear

Seems like a lot of comments here are US centric. As if Canonical and Suse don't exist and aren't Europe based/focused?

Also a lot of arguments that MS provides some total package which is irreplaceable which just isn't true. That argument seems to conflate software dominance in the US (is that even true? Linux runs most back end) with some kind of hardware dominance. MS doesn't provide hardware beyond some limited set of desktop hardware which most businesses don't even use. Most business lease from the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo both front and back end. This should probably be the real discussion.

https://nlnet.nl/project/SSH-Stamp/

SSH Stamp looks very interesting at a glance, but there is no information about a project page or a developer. A search for it with DuckDuckGo does not find any information beyond that page. I wonder if this is real. If there is anything open source about this, it is nothing like the open source projects I know.

I'm guessing there isn't anything yet besides the proposal. Since the project start is this month. Knowing NLnet, I think there should be something soon enough.

There is now a link: https://github.com/brainstorm/ssh-stamp

Something I came across yesterday was OpenCloud. I think with many of these small projects being funded it's not clear there's a cohesive vision of how to reclaim the internet. I mean the browser itself is owned by big tech. I don't know whether you have to start again at the protocol level.

https://opencloud.eu/en

Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.

One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.

The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.

Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).

Money down the toilet. Job #1 is to make a google replacement. Job #2, a domestic phone manufacturer (with its own plaftorm / appstore). These are the two primary portals to "The Internet". Without meaningful replacements, they're still on Uncle Sam's plantation. China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.

They are so far behind. Focus! Spitballing 42 random projects is a luxury Europe does not have.

You didn't spot the open hardware tablet in there? There was another announcement made almost simultaneously about funding for a.o. F-Droid:

https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20250421-project-selection-pilots...

There are many search projects you can find like marginalia.nu and Searx, just not in this call round.

If you are talking about the MNT reform, that is utterly fatuous. Same with f-droid. These are toys for IT fanboys--nothing that will significantly dislodge Europeans from the US tech teat. Europe needs iOS & Google-tier replacements ASAP. China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba. Even Russia has Yandex & Telegram. Europe has zilch.

I figured that after we were caught bugging Merkel's telephone, Europe would have at least gotten started, but I figured wrong.

We can agree to disagree on what is meaningful. Especially F-Droid is already widely used, and I would certainly not call it a toy.

You shouldn't rule out the snowball effect of FOSS. The nice thing about this kind of open program is that someone like you that has a beef and a clue can actually propose something, and get a grant to get the party started. After that, communities can kick in.

> Especially F-Droid is already widely used, and I would certainly not call it a toy.

F-Droid does not publish these statistics. How do you know this?

> China figured that out a long time ago, and is in a far better position to digitally de-couple from the United States.

Ok, that's great and I'm happy for them, how does that help us in Europe though? No matter how decoupled other countries are, doesn't make it less important for others to also eventually get there.

China built-up actual companies in a strategic order. Do what they did, rather than throw peanuts at a grab-bag of foss shitware. They are showing you the recipe for free.

China got there by banning Google. I don't think Europe is willing or able to do that unless Trump antagonism continues for years. Practically noone who has a choice (people in Singapore and Taiwan) between them uses Baidu

Trump has a 25% chance of dieing of old age before his term ends. It is unlikely that the US will relax the 2 terms max for president allowing him a second term. If Trump is your worry then you can just wait him out. The real question is will others like Trump get into power next or not, and if so how like Trump are they? (I cannot answer that)

I would certainly not bet on MAGA be gone post Trump. Firstly VP JD Vance is just as hostile, and ready to take over during Trumps term should anything happen.

Regardless, these euro-hostile MAGA voters will still breathe, eat and vote republican for the rest of my lifetime.

We should prepare in Europe for a future without the US in my opinion. Like China, but not, since the EU is about openness and freedom.

They will not be gone, the question is will they be large enough to get power.

Several people who I know who voted for Trump (not a representative sample!) do not like what he is doing with tariffs (they are not Euro-hostile) but they are worried about the border. They would support someone else if that person "fixed the border" without raising tariffs. There is also the possibility that someone could convince them that the border isn't a problem (or something else is more important).

I know a couple people who voted for Trump the person. They don't see Vance in the same way and so won't be excited to vote for him.

Only time will tell. However remember that this too shall pass. There will be a different crisis in a few years.

If Donald Trump is the sole motivation for this, they are hopelessly stupid. They need to be in control of their own infrastructure regardless of who runs the USA.

Depending on what you mean by in control you are either right or wrong.

You cannot do everything. Specialists can get really good at one thing, so it is best for the world to specialize and get those other things from someone else. Going it alone is bad for everyone.

However you also cannot trust anyone else. So you need to have plenty of options such that if one specialist turns out bad you can cut that one off.

EU has almost 450M people. USA had the thing on lockdown for decades with < 340M people. Japan made a hell of a showing in the 80s with < 124M. Europe has the human capital. It is foolish not to use it.

There are other considerations outside of globohomo quantifiables—like workforce development, domestic know-how, self-sufficiency, robustness to supply chain failures & geopolitical upheavals… Basically, the Taleb stuff.

Ban Google, make the internet a public utility, and fund a public search index.

With a catchphrase like "reclaim the public internet" I expected they were funding Anubis https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/ (don't get me wrong, they've got a neat list of projects, I'm just quibbling with what's "public internet" about solar powered motherboards or Ada bootstrapping.)

Anubis isn’t really about reclaiming the public internet, though: it’s about excluding some internet users. It has its reasons, of course, but it’s fundamentally about making the internet not a commons.

From my perspective, anubis (and iocaine etc) is about keeping misbehaving load generators from suppressing small-scale "classic internet" sites. So yeah, it's exclusionary, like keeping semi trucks from taking shortcuts through a schoolyard.

It would probably be better if it excluded problematic behavior rather than excluding classes of clients.

Sure, but there's a very high correlation between classes of client and problematic behavior, and said classes of clients go to great lengths to mask their problematic behavior.

While I get your point about Anubis excluding some users, its purpose is to protect the "commons" from those who would abuse and destroy them: big tech crawlers that do not respect robots.txt files.

For the purposes of analogy, imagine the commons as a park where you can have a picnic or play frisbee, and AI crawlers are people ripping it rip on their dirt bikes.

I have NLNet on the TODO list, I just haven't had time for it yet :(

https://nlnet.nl/project/Ada-bootstrap/

This is something I would be interested in but there is no link to a project page. I sent a message alerting them in case it was accidentally left out.

Risk appetite, accountability and support. These go against open source. Gone are the days when businesses were desperate for some software that just works. During my days at apache, I have seen large businesses officially allowing their devs to contribute to opensource full time. IBM being a large contributor. Now people can only accept managed software and hardware. Even if it opensource, it should be managed. Cloud providers offer a lot of opensource as managed services. That sells. No more wild-west.

I wish we could do something around cookies, trackers, ads,

Like a simpler web server for http that only supports certain.

Would be cool if a lot of these get added to PortableApps for easy install and updates...

The issue is that it is not enough to throw money at random projects. There should be at least high-level plan and rather specific goals. Frankly, "reclaim public internet" is a nice slogan, but it is too abstract to be a good, meaningful goal.

Also money is but a one issue. Free software has a big problem with coordination of efforts. Though many claim it is its strength, it is a handicap when it comes to political action (and free software is a political action).

In short, what we need is an equivalent of grand industrial policies of the past, but this time for free software.

Observations from CVE issue was showing exactly that - loads of people jumping out that they can pick it up and continue.

Would be fine only if they would look at what else is there like ENISA.

So like everyone would start doing something for themselves duplicating and wasting effort and money.

nlnet are gamechangers. Without them we'd have no Lemmy, and I would still be on Reddit

They applied in October 2024 and starting receiving funding (€ 50.000 max) in May 2025. This is beyond ridicoulness.

This is beyond ridiculousness.

An AI agent could make a far better job than many well-paid but extremely lazy european bureaurats.

Let alone the corruption, if they choose their friend projects.

I'm pro an unite Europe but current European Union is beyond shame.

What is your issue there ?

I'm currently working on integrating multi-participants video-conferencing in the Movim platform using the NLNet funding system https://nlnet.nl/project/Movim-E2EE-video/

Its super easy to apply and the people are super nice to work with. Also try to find a company that would be interested to implement those kind of features for 5-50K€, they'll laugh at you.

For a tiny bit of "public funding" you get many exciting features on many different open-source projects and initiatives that millions of users are using daily.$

Also NLNet is an independant non-profit organization. No "lazy-european-bureaucrats" there.

> Wikipedia: The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.

> What is your issue there ?

I applied to NGI Zero in December 2024, because it was promoted on European Union websites, and my application was rejected by the NLnet Foundation in April 2025.

After FOUR MONTHS instead of one as supposed. Without a decent explanation.

This is not the first time I have applied for a European grant. But got nothing till now.

Once I applied for another Cascade Funding Call, and I mentor was assigned to me. It was a lady from a non-European country who was ignorant about popular innovation projects. And she was supposed to assist me and even judge my project.

I, a European citizen without a job, should have been assisted by an ignorant non-European person paid with European funds. It was devastating for me.

Later, I also applied to be a mentor for the same program, but my application was rejected.

So, I can't help but think that corruption is real and rampant in European offices.

Even tho I demonstrated many times my skills, even winning some important competitions, I'm long-term unemployed.

I've been registered on EURES, the European Union job portal, for more than ten years. As well as on the job portal of my country of residence. No one contacted me to offer me a job. EVER.

That said, after seeing how disgusting the current European Union is, I have no choice but to support any movement in favor of dismantling it. I hope it happens as soon as possible.

> I applied to NGI Zero in December 2024, because it was promoted on European Union websites, and my application was rejected by the NLnet Foundation in April 2025.

ahaha!

  The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain
  The tempting clusters were too high to gain;
  Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile,
  And cried, 'They’re sour and hardly worth my while.'

So the fox deserves to starve to death, and the grapes, even tho they belong to all citizens, have to be reserved for a small group of privileged friends? Is this your opinion?

> I applied to NGI Zero in December 2024, because it was promoted on European Union websites, and my application was rejected by the NLnet Foundation in April 2025. > After FOUR MONTHS instead of one as supposed. Without a decent explanation.

Same for me! I spent lots time to make a presentation for my project. It was my first attempt. And if you look to the awarded projects, most of them are poor, uninteresting (for me at least) or have no link to project website. Seems unprofessional. I'm glad is not only my opinion.

Anyway, my project will continue without their support and I hope to release it open-source soon. Fortunately, for now I can sustain it by myself (from my time/money).

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