Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

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.

> 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.

> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you

While 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.

I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.

> 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?

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.

And how would that new system vendor not become the european equivalent of microsoft? What you describe is exactly that.

> A new system vendor needs to be created

If 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.

My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.

Yes, I checked it out afterwards, seems like a decent program. My comment was more about EU investing in OSS large scale. I've seen how EU projects get awarded and I doubt anything of value will come out of that, especially once cost is accounted for.

Both have their ups and downs, but broadly speaking, private money tends to be a lot more flexible and risk-liberal, whereas public money can be like having the worst aspects of the ignorant absentee CEOs-golf-buddy manager and the micromanaging hands-on desperate-to-prove-himself CEOs-nephew manager.

Public money is eventually traced back to some elected official who has absolutely nothing to do with technology but is also very emotionally-invested in showing to the constituents that the money isn't being wasted - to the point where spending the money on something useless but concrete ("ergonomic" coffee mugs) might be deemed preferable to a long-term investment that falls on the wrong side of a term-limit.

Again, public money can be fine and completely no-strings sometimes (and, conversely, private charitable contributions can sometimes end up with plenty of strings too), but there's certainly reasons to point out the differences.

We can agree to disagree on what is meaningful. Especially F-Droid is already widely used, and I would certainly not call it a toy.

You shouldn't rule out the snowball effect of FOSS. The nice thing about this kind of open program is that someone like you that has a beef and a clue can actually propose something, and get a grant to get the party started. After that, communities can kick in.