'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.
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