4/23/2025 at 8:02:49 AM
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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 3:08:37 PM
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...
by thmsths
4/24/2025 at 12:00:10 PM
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.
by WhyNotHugo
4/24/2025 at 5:02:49 PM
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.
by kingnothing
4/25/2025 at 11:11:25 AM
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.
by WhyNotHugo
4/25/2025 at 7:42:48 PM
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.
by kingnothing
4/26/2025 at 3:10:15 PM
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.by fc417fc802
4/24/2025 at 9:10:45 AM
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.by pabs3
4/23/2025 at 4:10:25 PM
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!by dingnuts
4/23/2025 at 4:26:51 PM
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.
by Wobbles42
4/23/2025 at 4:21:17 PM
Exactly. Just like Airbus can't compete with the likes of Boeing.by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 4:40:33 PM
Well. At least airbus dosent drop out of the skies, or loose emergency doors out of the blue.by gunalx
4/23/2025 at 5:54:35 PM
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...by subulaz
4/23/2025 at 4:54:35 PM
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.by thmsths
4/23/2025 at 5:05:56 PM
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.
by ethbr1
4/23/2025 at 5:21:54 PM
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.
by thmsths
4/23/2025 at 9:59:16 PM
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.
by ethbr1
4/23/2025 at 4:23:36 PM
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).by ambicapter
4/23/2025 at 4:25:30 PM
looks at the American health care systemby hiddencost
4/23/2025 at 5:10:52 PM
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.
by ethbr1
4/23/2025 at 10:39:22 AM
> 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?
by graemep
4/23/2025 at 11:15:24 AM
>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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 11:26:33 AM
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.
by graemep
4/23/2025 at 2:05:56 PM
Don't forget enterprise management. Windows makes it easy to maintain a fleet of endpoints much easier than MacOS or Linux.by sybercecurity
4/23/2025 at 2:36:12 PM
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?
by ndriscoll
4/23/2025 at 2:44:48 PM
> 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.
by DrillShopper
4/23/2025 at 2:53:35 PM
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.
by ndriscoll
4/23/2025 at 3:54:07 PM
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
by DrillShopper
4/23/2025 at 5:19:15 PM
Windows: I can pay a low skilled admin who knows how to run prebuilt toolsLinux: 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.
by ethbr1
4/23/2025 at 6:07:54 PM
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
by DrillShopper
4/23/2025 at 4:54:18 PM
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.by graemep
4/23/2025 at 1:56:19 PM
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.by 9dev
4/23/2025 at 3:45:59 PM
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.
by pessimizer
4/23/2025 at 4:34:11 PM
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.
by Wobbles42
4/23/2025 at 4:59:37 PM
> 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.
by graemep
4/23/2025 at 2:29:34 PM
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.by graemep
4/23/2025 at 2:38:48 PM
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.
by john_the_writer
4/23/2025 at 3:36:49 PM
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.by rolph
4/23/2025 at 8:19:17 AM
> 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.
by pickledoyster
4/23/2025 at 8:22:39 AM
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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 8:46:39 AM
> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for youWhile 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.
by alias_neo
4/23/2025 at 10:46:26 AM
> 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.
by robertlagrant
4/23/2025 at 12:19:08 PM
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.by monade
4/23/2025 at 12:49:16 PM
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.
by robertlagrant
4/23/2025 at 2:45:31 PM
> 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.)
by musicale
4/23/2025 at 4:39:15 PM
True, but we always have the opportunity to eliminate a similar need for time travel 40 years from now.by Wobbles42
4/23/2025 at 11:14:10 AM
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.by alias_neo
4/23/2025 at 4:39:39 PM
These are not mutually exclusive.by Wobbles42
4/23/2025 at 11:20:04 AM
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.
by Mossy9
4/23/2025 at 11:42:10 AM
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.
by rglullis
4/23/2025 at 1:14:57 PM
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.
by alias_neo
4/23/2025 at 11:26:02 AM
> 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.
by rglullis
4/23/2025 at 2:47:01 PM
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.
by john_the_writer
4/23/2025 at 3:24:08 PM
> 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.
by mr_toad
4/23/2025 at 2:55:48 PM
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.
by rglullis
4/23/2025 at 12:49:38 PM
> 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.
by mschuster91
4/23/2025 at 1:27:34 PM
> 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.
by rglullis
4/23/2025 at 3:49:47 PM
> 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.
by mschuster91
4/23/2025 at 4:07:57 PM
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.by rglullis
4/23/2025 at 8:37:20 AM
I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.by sam_lowry_
4/23/2025 at 9:00:31 AM
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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 1:13:31 PM
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.
by omnimus
4/23/2025 at 11:11:07 AM
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.
by sam_lowry_
4/23/2025 at 11:23:12 AM
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.by Mossy9
4/23/2025 at 2:51:13 PM
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"by john_the_writer
4/23/2025 at 11:11:46 AM
RedHat and SuSe do compete there.by 3np
4/23/2025 at 8:48:44 AM
> 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?
by repelsteeltje
4/23/2025 at 2:07:30 PM
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.by sybercecurity
4/23/2025 at 8:50:58 AM
There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 10:11:32 AM
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.by flir
4/23/2025 at 1:21:32 PM
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"
by bluGill
4/23/2025 at 8:34:34 AM
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.
by mvanbaak
4/23/2025 at 9:36:53 AM
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.by monade
4/23/2025 at 10:44:02 AM
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....by graemep
4/23/2025 at 11:06:02 AM
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.by robertlagrant
4/23/2025 at 11:40:49 AM
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.
by graemep
4/23/2025 at 10:16:52 AM
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.
by Guthur
4/23/2025 at 11:46:59 AM
> you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchyEr, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?
by robertlagrant
4/23/2025 at 8:09:05 AM
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).
by Deukhoofd
4/23/2025 at 8:17:15 AM
>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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 8:44:24 AM
And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.by mvanbaak
4/23/2025 at 9:01:10 AM
If it’s government owned/controlled it will be much, much worse than Microsoft (purely from the product quality perspective)by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 7:15:15 PM
Uh? Why? You think that government employees are genetically stupid?by guappa
4/24/2025 at 4:58:02 AM
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).
by wqaatwt
4/24/2025 at 5:58:15 AM
Your religious faith in the perfect market is a dangerous cult. I hope you can seek help at some point.by guappa
4/24/2025 at 5:37:21 PM
What perfect market? What is that even supposed to mean..by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 9:07:48 AM
And?by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 8:58:23 AM
> A new system vendor needs to be createdIf 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.
by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 9:27:12 AM
> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progressNot 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.
by vouwfietsman
4/23/2025 at 12:27:14 PM
> most progressWell 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?
by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 10:46:13 PM
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.
by antonvs
4/24/2025 at 5:04:25 AM
> 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.
by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 3:51:12 PM
There is an uncomfortable truth to reconcile with in that the vast majority of technological progress in private companies has come from monopolistic ones.by GoatInGrey
4/24/2025 at 5:07:40 AM
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.
by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 9:28:19 AM
> Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress.Source: "100 things that never happened"
by guappa
4/23/2025 at 12:30:09 PM
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.
by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 10:19:06 AM
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.
by flir
4/23/2025 at 12:32:52 PM
I don’t know if that many Nobel prizes were rewarded to any anyone working on software or even computing in general.by wqaatwt
4/23/2025 at 12:56:34 PM
[dead]by computerthings
4/23/2025 at 10:01:13 AM
[flagged]by Timwi
4/23/2025 at 8:21:43 AM
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.by 47282847
4/23/2025 at 11:48:55 AM
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.
by cookiengineer
4/23/2025 at 12:21:35 PM
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.by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 1:29:59 PM
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)
by bluGill
4/23/2025 at 1:54:34 PM
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...
by halffullbrain
4/24/2025 at 9:15:55 AM
LibreOffice/Collabora online could work for #3.https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/
by pabs3
4/24/2025 at 9:17:29 AM
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.by pabs3
4/23/2025 at 12:11:40 PM
KDE Plasma is actually in the list...by monade
4/23/2025 at 4:15:21 PM
And I'll be happy to see Dolphin get decent keyboard navigation.by kps
4/23/2025 at 5:05:50 PM
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.
by freedomben
4/24/2025 at 9:18:39 AM
The hardware vendors should just offer OS choice at checkout time, and revenue sharing for the resulting choices.by pabs3
4/24/2025 at 6:26:09 PM
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.by freedomben
4/25/2025 at 1:56:10 AM
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.
by pabs3
4/23/2025 at 8:13:05 AM
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendorsGoogle'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.
by maelito
4/23/2025 at 8:19:05 AM
>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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 10:05:43 AM
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.
by Flatterer3544
4/23/2025 at 10:26:34 AM
> 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.
by preisschild
4/23/2025 at 8:22:30 AM
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.
by jonathanstrange
4/23/2025 at 8:26:04 AM
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.by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 9:25:07 AM
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.
by noirscape
4/23/2025 at 10:51:40 AM
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.
by Tmpod
4/23/2025 at 1:44:55 PM
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.by bluGill
4/23/2025 at 11:53:50 AM
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.
by monade
4/23/2025 at 1:42:18 PM
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).
by bluGill
4/23/2025 at 10:53:45 AM
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.
by p_ing
4/23/2025 at 1:37:41 PM
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.
by bluGill
4/23/2025 at 2:21:37 PM
> 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.
by p_ing
4/23/2025 at 9:30:58 AM
> 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!
by guappa
4/23/2025 at 8:37:33 AM
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.
by jonathanstrange
4/23/2025 at 9:14:10 AM
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!
by vladms
4/23/2025 at 9:43:40 AM
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.
by pjmlp
4/23/2025 at 9:07:22 AM
>You're assuming that people want to switchNo, 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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 10:17:37 AM
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.
by jonathanstrange
4/23/2025 at 10:10:39 AM
> What "people" want is already irrelevantThis! 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].
by nonrandomstring
4/23/2025 at 11:58:49 AM
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 tryby akudha
4/23/2025 at 8:33:19 AM
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.
by bbarnett
4/23/2025 at 10:40:09 AM
> 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.
by KronisLV
4/23/2025 at 12:54:39 PM
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.
by mr_mitm
4/23/2025 at 10:46:28 AM
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.
by p_ing
4/23/2025 at 8:40:01 AM
>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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 9:00:14 AM
> 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.
by nonrandomstring
4/23/2025 at 9:38:39 AM
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.by mcv
4/23/2025 at 11:12:02 AM
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.
by lesostep
4/23/2025 at 9:08:34 AM
>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.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 9:37:20 AM
> seems to be no alternativeThat 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.
by nonrandomstring
4/23/2025 at 9:48:43 AM
I don't particularly care.This is not a nice to have. It is about European security.
by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 10:14:04 AM
I think we agree. But security is also very much about examining assumptions.by nonrandomstring
4/23/2025 at 1:32:47 PM
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.by bluGill
4/23/2025 at 8:19:44 AM
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...by pydry
4/23/2025 at 8:27:14 AM
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.by constantcrying
4/23/2025 at 9:09:38 AM
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.
by pydry
4/23/2025 at 3:12:47 PM
> 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.
by fidotron