'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 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?
@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.