[whh]

I think a move to Open Source would be great in Europe, but only if the governments using the technologies are actively funding their development.

This doesn't just mean once-off grants, or a bit of cash donated here and there. I would like to see per-user per-year contributions to the organisations that develop these tools on-par with the current spend going towards Microsoft Cloud products.

It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.

[Thanemate]

I would replace "funding" with at minimum "contributing", because there are people who would think having a government actively dipping their toes in a product gives them right over actively piloting the direction of that product.

I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.

[leke]

I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum. A lot of these institutions are funded by the government anyway, so it would make sense to support the technology running your country which funds you.

[rbanffy]

> I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum

As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm in.

[embedding-shape]

> It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.

Lol no. Microsoft profits more than the value they provide, not exactly we should want to copy. We need to prevent hypercapitalism from reaching us in Europe, not make it worse, as we now seen exactly what it does to countries when you let it grow unfettered.

But I agree in general, governments and companies that use FOSS should donate back either engineering-time or money, but no need to do complicated "per-user per-year contributions", give them a sum per year, enough to fund the core developers at least and ideally to hire new ones, otherwise hire engineers and let them full-time contribute back.

Luckily, at least in Europe, this is exactly what we're seeing now. The governments who are looking into FOSS are all thinking about how to help fund it, no one seem to be thinking "How can we do this for free?" which is nice thing to see.

[hbn]

Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model and it's not capitalism.

[kakacik]

Europe as in EU can certainly use a bit more capitalism. Nothing brutal like US or China have where individuals are often crushed by system or situation with no help in sight, but Europe got lazy, complacent, used to over-generous unsustainable easy to abuse social system and generally living off debt to future generations. Self-serving massive bureaucracy and corruption. Companies like car makers are already being hit badly and its going to get a lot worse with global competition.

For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really a mini version of EU.

This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on. Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any EU country.