'Finnish Minister: EU Needs to Establish Own OS, Web Browser':
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/02/26/business/bc-eu-finland-eu-operating-system.html
... or just use choose a distro of GNU/Linux and Firefox.
@strypey Or just support the existing ones. If the "establish" or "choose" on it will just get something that is averaged for everyone.
@kravietz I'm not sure what you mean.
Let's say they choose Ubuntu or whatever else - the distro has its important place, but it not best for all purposes.
A huge public sector project forking it will result in plenty of lobbying to implement this, then that and feature creep, until it's not really usable for anything.
The minister is also missing the point: we don't depend on anyone in terms of software, we're pretty good in terms of software. It's the hardware that we have huge dependency on.
@kravietz
> It's the hardware that we have huge dependency on.
I agree. Antitrust action to prevent the major US vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon) dominating the OEM market would help a lot, just as the legal actions that limited Microsoft's ability to force Windows users to surf the web with Internet Exploiter made space for the emergence of Firefox and other replacements.
Or preventing vendor lock-in and other anti-competitive technologies (Google Play Services, proposed ban on custom firmware in routers and mobiles), supporting open-hardware (eg. CoreBoot). Lots can be done to improve this situation.
@kravietz agreed. Goggle leverages their control over Android to control what mobile hardware vendors can do, just as Microsift does with their control over Windows and thus desk/ laptop hardware. Apple uses their control over both hardware and software to do things like ban all copyleft software from their devices. All of this is profoundly anti-competitive.
@kravietz Perhaps we need a cross-disciplinary team of tech geeks and antitrust law experts working on recommendations for both legal action and tech regulation reform?
At the same time EU needs to be very careful not to end up with something like "we build our own hardware just to build out own hardware", like Russia did with their Elbrus family of processors that are ~10 years behind the state of the art. They at least found their niche in the military sector.
Or for that matter, like EU did in 2000's when it spent millions on Quaero search engine whose main purpose was to be anti-Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
@kravietz #Quaero was not an inherently bad idea. A project like that could produce many useful fruits if there were strings attached to the funding that obliged all code and documentation to be developed in the open, under libre licenses. Developing search technology targeted at what might serve the #PublicInterest in 10-20 years time, would be a better brief than building a Euro Goggle clone. Kind of like what #NlNet are doing now:
https://nlnet.nl/discovery/
Absolutely, it was a brilliant and innovative idea (image search in 2000's?) but it was killed by politics, vague objectives and funding for the sake of funding, rather than achieving some objective.
I've been living in Poland back then, who was target of huge EU funding for innovation. This is a great thing in a country where lack of capital is frequently an very basic show stopper for any innovative idea to be turned into a business.
@strypey Unfortunately, while many universities and companies used these funds to do just that - expand their existing research and business acumen - it also attracted a whole new class of parasitic entepreneurs, for whom it was purely a way to make a quick buck.
We had an avalanche of "social portal for cats" and similar "innovations" that were merely engineered to satisfy formal requirements, get funding and then maintain for only as long as required by the contract.
@strypey Some people argued the money still "went to the people" but it's not sustainable.
I believe DARPA-style funding would be way more effective in this case - find a real problems and fund grants for companies and universities to solve them while precisely accounting their progress and outcome based on clearly defined criteria.
They will not only acquire the necessary capital but also business acumen, which they can then further use for 3rd party projects.
But if your success criteria are set like "increase overall happiness of society" it's never going to work...
So maybe it's my past poor experience with EU programs speaking here, but I'm just concerned that if EU decides to create "our own Linux" we'll again end up with an project that is vaguely defined in terms of project objectives (again: Quaero) and suffers from all typical diseases from feature creep to politics.
@kravietz this is a general problem with IT procurement in governments around the world. See:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/103758251428633971
@kravietz I guess it depends whether we're talking about home/ community use or institutional use. Individual users choosing whichever distro suits their needs is fine. But for use in governmental organisations, a GNU/Linux distro customized for their needs (like #LiMux) would be necessary for security auditing, efficient rollout and end user support etc. Not to mention the UX can go through an #agile design process involving some of the public servants and general public who will use it.