They should also fund the projects that they're using. Then everyone benefits.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Agreed... And they will. They will want functions that are stable and works... They can easily put some funds into that...
Public money, public infra and public funding? :)
EU is pretty good at funding stuff actually, but mind your pitchforks if you see Hyprland, Ladybird or some other bigotfueled projects on some collateral-funding list.
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A quick reminder in this context: The German government wants to introduce Palantir nationwide, even though this violates applicable law - both at the European and national levels. Contracts have even already been signed in some federal states.
Here is a link to a Campact petition calling on the SPD to block the CDU/CSU's plans.
In my opinion, everyone living in Germany should sign both petitions - it is scandalous that this is even necessary, but unfortunately, conservative german politicians in particular continue to pursue their shady dealings.
It's an recurrent claim by the right wings, but same as the Chatcontrol, rejected, because incompatibility with the privacy rights in the EU which would be violated with Palantir and the Chat control.. There isn't any reason to introduce the control, because the current law permits an individual chat control in an crime investigation with an court order, but not an global control, which would be the same as open and controlling private cards and correspondence, which obvious is a no go.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/chatkontrolle-eu-deutschland-bmjv-hubig-whatsapp-signal
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/chatkontrolle-eu-justizministerin-100.html
conservative german politicians in particular continue to pursue their shady dealings.
and will push their gov'ts back into the microsoft/google fold when they approve purchase of the next big system; and you can only hope that palantir isn't it.
Spread it around with every German you know. Or even post on Germany related communities
Friendly little reminder:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
Do Android next. Please.
A thousand percent yes! Wait wait WAIT BIG IDEA!!!
Everybody listen up, let's all suggest to EU Countries to partner up with PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, & Free Software Foundation's Librephone project so they can all get funding!!
That way they can get made way faster than they are now
You need hardware vendors on board or you'll get nowhere.
Eh, Europe is an important enough market that they could use legislation to get the desired result out of hardware vendors, or something close enough to it. If the EU or a majority of European nations stipulated that everything had to be compatible with open source operating systems I'm pretty confident that it would happen. There would be pushback. Likely they'd claim that it'd impede their ability to turn a profit, create development cost issues, and be extremely insecure, but once things were set into motion they would find a way to make it work.
Yeah, I don't disagree with that. Just wanted to highlight that strong software projects are not enough.
I work in SW for a device vendor and I see how much communication there is between OS, vendors and everything in between.
Nokia, Fairphone, Volla. All EU Vendors.
2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe
Motorola too to add on
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not a moment too soon... we've worked on this back in the early 2000s, then Microsoft steamrolled everything with local government contracts (coughtBRIBEScough) and look how well that turned out.
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@Zerush i am so long waiting for a linux phone, that can be used as daily driver (for everyone!) made in eu! signal, thunderbird, firefox, and i am happy ... the rest i can handle from firefox as webapp...
I would love to see a SailfishOS phone like Jolla's gain more widespread market/sales
Isn't sailfish proprietary?
I had to double check. It's based on Linux and Open Source Software, but the UI is proprietary.
I wonder if resurrecting Firefox OS might still be an option. It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.
There's the KaiOS fork, but the direction is not really the same since it's more targeted to low power keypad-based phones... and I believe they replaced much of the Gonk layer with a very stripped down low level Android base which isnt fully open source... maybe if they coordinated with the LibrePhone project and some hw manufacturers (like EU-based Nokia) we'd get a fully free stack.
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Yeah Canadians are so serious about boycotting the US, except everyone still uses Mastercard, Visa, Android, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Linkedin, Indeed, FB, IG, etc. etc. They can't even press the free delete account button, what a great boycott! Finally after almost a year only the EU is just beginning to discuss digital sovereignty.
Well, you can't expect the whole net of dependency to be torn down that quickly when it took decades to be established. Especially if you want a somewhat normal life.
Even before the latest acceleration into fascism I kept looking for alternatives of almost everything I use and the pain is something I've just got used to when it started with switching to Linux only over 20 years ago. Of course I still get envious when iPhone users just quickly AirDrop some pics, so I get why it's not always easy to switch to alternatives.
But alternatives exist. Exploring them has become a lot more mainstream and they get more funding and support.
When you and your wife send pics over KDE Connect instead is a powerful moment. Still requires one phone to connect to the other over hotspot or be on the same network at home, but its slick otherwise.
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It will happen though everything takes time and effort. Wonder what a Mastercard/Visa open source alternative would even look like though. Facebook alt I am debating making myself with a team of interested people but building it out to see how it would be done
Open Source Alternatives:
- PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, and FSF Librephone (Europe should partner with them all for funding)
- All kinds of AWS, and Google alts for each product: alternativeto.net shows plenty
- A person is making a LinkedIn/Indeed alternative (They posted on the Open Source community here on Lemmy) and want to make a team overtime too
- Stoat for open source Discord alt also a team in place
- A team is working on Flashes (IG Alt)
- Another team on Spark.so (TTok Alt) 2 decent alternatives for now until we get full blown decentralized options
There's pixelfed for an Instagram alternative, which is based on the activitypub protocol. If flashes is built on bluesky I don't think it will make much of a difference if the protocol is controlled by a company.
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Thierry Carrez commented, "Did you notice what I didn't talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI."
...
The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure," continued Carrez, "that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments.
He was so close to greatness :(
Well, respect AI, there is a big one from Swiss, Apertus with its PublicAI, using the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), also used by the CERN. All 100%FOSS and privacy centred. I currently use the PublicAI in my bookmarks (free account (nick,mail). The Apertus dataset can also be downloaded if someone want to selfhost it (~90 GB min)
respect AI
No thank you. Even if its FOSS it wastes tons of resources.
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I mean yeah. Trump could tomorrow make some idiotic statement about tariffs on American cloud services like aws. Seriously, who would be surprised?
Before Trump, nobody would even suggest to distance themselves from the USA. Now, everyone is thinking it.
Great job I guess, if you want a planet where countries are fighting eachother instead of working together. But Trump mentality is that he must be the winner, always. He cant understand that sometimes another country being winner also helps his own. He must be the winner.
He is the typical guy in the sandbox that takes the entire sandbox because its all about him.
Your comments are not wrong, but also Trump is not the sole issue here. There would still be a problem even if he was removed from office today.
Proprietary software and services are an issue regardless of which government jurisdiction they fall under. It's a good idea for the EU to be moving to open source instead of proprietary solutions based in the EU.
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After so many decades of being reliant on US proprietary tech, now they're moving away to foss?!
Sounds excellent but I'll remain reluctant until I see wide scale adoption.
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I'm interested to see what an open source cloud standard would look like. There's a lot of elements that share functionality between Azure and AWS, but they're just different enough that it's a massive pain in the arse to move from one to the other and you basically have to re-write your Terraform from scratch.
If there was something that was standard so I could write Terraform that goes "I want thirteen microservices all running in docker containers and a message bus with these types of message that lets them communicate" without specifying the exact implementation, I would be a happy camper.
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It's almost mind-blowing how people still rely on Azure, Windows, and MS Office for really sensitive shit. Like, MS might as well be an arm of the US Government if they aren't already. All the foreign governments storing sensitive shit in Azure servers is just fucking wild to me. So what if the data centres are stored outside of the USA? The parent company is still the parent company.
It seems like backend companies are ready for this, but today, what are the options for individual end users looking to escape google etc? Proton has a package with mail, storage, etc, murena for phones, nextcloud, opencloud, suite numerique, is the industry converging on any standards here like .odt for documents but for other standards and protocols?
Well, LibreOffice and other free office suites use by default .odt, but all are capable to open and export any other document format, even more than MSOffice is capable to do. In Spain since years administrations and companies are usin LibreOffice and OpenOffice without problems. Spain is one of the most advanced countries in the EU respect OpenSource-
Open Source Initiatives and Events in Spain
Spain has several notable open source initiatives and events spanning education, government, and industry:
Government Initiatives
The Galician government launched Mancomún in 2006 to promote free and open source software (FOSS), achieving significant cost savings by migrating public administration to LibreOffice and other open source tools[^9]. By 2018, the government completed migration of all workstations to open source productivity suites, reducing licensing costs by 50% (€1.7 million annually)[^9].
Major Events
Open Source Summit Europe takes place in Spain, with the 2023 event held in Bilbao from September 19-21[^8]. The summit brings together developers, technologists and community leaders to advance open source innovation[^8].
Education and Resources
Several Spanish-language open educational resources support learning:
- El Atareao (atareao.es), a Spanish blog focused on GNU/Linux and open source topics[^1]
- Español Abierto, a collection maintained by the University of Texas for Spanish language learners[^3]
- LibriVox's Spanish audiobook collection featuring public domain works[^3]
Business Adoption
Major companies recognize Spain's open source expertise. In 2016, Accenture acquired Spanish firm Tecnilógica to expand its open source capabilities, noting the company's skill in "using emerging and open source technologies"[^7].
[^1]: My Linux story: Covering open source in Spanish [^3]: 6 open educational resources for learning Spanish [^7]: Accenture Acquires Tecnilógica to Scale Its Open Source Digital Skills in Spain [^8]: Open Source Summit Europe (Bilbao, Spain) – Zephyr Project [^9]: Free & Open Source Software in Galicia, Spain: The Mancomún Project
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