[fh973]

Europe does not need more open source, it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.

It doesn't matter if the email platform a government uses is open source, but it should be able to pick a local alternative. It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.

Policy may help the European software industry, at least governments should actively work on getting away from their Microsoft addiction. Open source may be one of the options, but it is not the right model for all types of software.

Blindly preferring open source may kill otherwise viable local software businesses.

[palata]

> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry

Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.

> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.

I don't think they are talking about creating a mobile OS? But I do think that e-ID and similar government apps should be open source, so that people can trust them.

> Open source may be one of the options, but it is not the right model for all types of software.

Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.

[rdm_blackhole]

> Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.

Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe? Concretely no. What's stopping this is that most governments in Europe are taxing companies to death to fund social services that end up in deficit anyway.

It's getting tiring of hearing of the big bad Microsoft that stops poor Europe from competing properly.

The EU tech salaries are ridiculously low and the tax burden is unreasonably high. Add on top of that an aversion to risk from the banks and VC funds in Europe and this is what you get.

[consp]

> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source.

Or create an open source reference implementation and leave the final solution to the market. Everyone can use the reference implementation but if you think you can do better use your own. This includes a government doing it themselves either based on the reference implementation or not.

[cryptica]

> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.

Yes. The government has more than enough leverage to demand this. Skill was never the problem. The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption. The problem with the regulations is that they were designed with the explicit intent to stifle competition.

"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" - This fact is pure corruption. I remember, when I was at university, one of the courses I took had a project management component and we did an assessment researching failed software projects and it turns out that there were a huge number of failed projects running in the hundreds of millions and even billions (and that was a lot of money at the time); always the same companies kept coming up. IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.

[carlosjobim]

What is a European made operating system I can purchase for my computer?

[u8080]

Idk, europeans saying thing like "It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive" implying EU companies are not anti-competitive and EU government is not extremely protectionist.

[PurpleRamen]

> Europe does not need more open source,

Europe is not one country, not even the EU is perfectly united. It's a dozen different countries, each with their own political and technical landscape, and Open Source is seen as the logical solution to unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator.

> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.

It has a good software industry, and it could of course be always better, but USA is still bigger and more dominating. Ther eis also a difference between software and service. Popular Cloud-services for common work is rare in Europe, building them is and making them popular, especially on a european level, is important.

> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.

It's all about control. Open Source matters, becausse it gives more control, more insight, less chance some other country is spying on your and someday switching off something important.

[pembrook]

> unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator

If you're afraid that one country might create a better software product/company and win the market and this would become 'unfair,' you've already lost the plot.

Instead of harnessing the best talent the EU has to offer, you're making sure they never get off the ground in the name of 'fairness.' Tall poppy syndrome in the extreme.

I'm sorry but the free market-denial that's become endemic among European central planners is getting wildly irrational at this point. Every year we creep closer to USSR-level government spending as % of GDP, crowding out private sector activity.

Do you understand that the entire tax base of the EU is dependent on private sector businesses competing with each other to offer better products and services? Unfairness and exceptionalism and its winners are what funds our entire way of life.

We can redistribute some of the earnings from the winners to the losers after the fact (as we already do at 50% on average). But we absolutely need to have the market competition to drive value in the first place for there to be anything to redistribute!

[iso1631]

We've seen that some open source licenses make way for American money to steal the monetisation -- Elasticsearch found this to their peril when Amazon swooped in and offered it as a service

The other problem is the ability for American companies and funds to just buy European companies.

If Europe wants to stop this is needs to be very aware of the licensing agreements, and to pass laws to limit foreign investment - like China, India etc do.

[wtarreau]

No, it needs first to encourage local investment. Companies who seek investors or who get sold do not do it by pleasure, but as a last resort before dying. And in the EU you don't get any offer to save a company that has a limited commercial activity. Many companies die every day by lack of money. It turns our that US etc are willing to take much more risk and invest sufficient money to transform such fragile companies into durable ones. And in the case of software it's great, because software is sold all over the world, and the income serves to hire more local people, so in the end it's a way to really develop EU sales to the rest of the world. It would clearly be better if the investors were EU-based, but at least it's better than nothing that some investors are willing to risk their money on such companies.

[tgv]

It's not that simple. The Dutch government uses a commercial service for their digital id, and now that company is going to be sold into American hands.

[torginus]

I disagree. Let's say there's an app that stores healthcare data in an EU compliant format, there's 3 possibilities:

- Every country develops its own solution, which is good for employee demand, but can be inefficient

- Every country standardizes on a proprietary solution. The problem will be that said solution will most likely come from one of the major EU countries (say Germany) and others will feel left out and forced to use that solution. Said solution will be Germany-first, so local demands will have to go a slow and expensive contracting process. Said company will sell access to APIs, meaning integrating and building innovation on top will be tied to that commercial entity

- Every country uses the same standard software that's open source. There's no licensing fees, everyone can modify the code to accomodate local needs. Development costs are low. Proprietary local solution can be built on top without having to pay anyone.

It's clear to me, that when the customer is the public, and open-source solution should be preferred.

[fh973]

This app currently runs on Android or iOS.

Anyway, open source is fine there. But you're not getting things like a Desktop or Web office suite (OpenOffice is an historical accident), an enterprise device management, endpoint security, ... this way.

[amunozo]

There is another option, to develop pan-european software as it has been done in other areas such as aerospace.

[jszymborski]

They say "open source" but they are looking for "no-profit motive" IMO. Which is fine, but they should be opening a generous fund for democratically-run non-profits whose primary activity is developing open software which is useful for the EU and is an alternative to US corp-controlled software.

EU has plenty of these orgs it can generously fund, and scoping funding like this would create more. Some existing examples (many of which accept gov't funds but need a lot more to rival big tech):

- https://framasoft.org/en/

- https://www.igalia.com/

- https://deuxfleurs.fr/

- https://www.chatons.org/

[wtarreau]

In my opinion it's the opposite. This type of associations is welcome, and they are fine to promote free software and help people, but they are exactly like neighborhood associations: they're mostly local, relying on volunteers with limited time who become a new dependency for people who were not using these services. That's fine for limited use case but it doesn't scale at all, and causes a huge duplication of efforts (organization, software creation -- several of them reinvented stuff that already exists, advertising etc). And associations rarely if ever merge, because most often association creators have a very clear view of what they're seeking (often idealist) and are rarely willing to compromise it and accept to adopt another association's mostly similar but not exactly identical goals (it often works very similarly to political parties). GAFAMs would never exist under this model.

The problem is that such services which proudly run on low budget, volunteers and recycled hardware, cannot be relied on by companies without risking to enter legal trouble in case of major incident, so it means that a higher-grade service is still needed, with a dedicate funding, and we're facing fragmentation. We must not reproduce the scheme of cloudwatt either. Too much money injected into a wet dream that was only used to spend lots of money in consultants coming here just to confirm their presence and get their check.

What is needed instead is to sponsor the development of such activities by a few (2-3) well-established competing companies, so as to avoid the regular risk of monoculture that diverges from what users expect, and help them reach the point where their offerings can compete with GAFAM's for both end users and enterprise. The contract should be clear that services must rely on open formats, make it possible for leaving users to retrieve all their data, that software developed under such funding must be opensource, though technology acquisition is fine, and that these offerings must become self-sustaining at one point (i.e. a mix of free+paid services). The EU funders should have enough shares of these activities so that their permission is required for business acquisition and that they can restrict it to EU-based companies, so that such companies can still grow and seek public funding.

What we need is a few durable big players, not 10000 incompatible associations each with their own software suite, that no enterprise can trust over the long term and that cannot resist a trivial DDoS by lack of a robust infrastructure, and who are not organized enough to run full-stack security audits to make sure that user data are properly protected. These ones are only fine for friends and family but that's not what we're missing the most (the proof is that they already exist).

[orochimaaru]

Why does the governments Microsoft addiction have anything to do with European software industry? Asking as an American whose governments are also addicted to Microsoft.