BuyFromEU

1170 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to BuyFromEU—a community committed to supporting European-made products and services! Whether you're searching for locally crafted fashion, innovative technology, delicious food, or professional services, this is your space to share, explore, and promote businesses that strengthen the European market.

founded 11 months ago

MODERATORS

tfm@europe.pub

Folks, tell the European Commission why open source is so important (ec.europa.eu)

submitted 1 month ago by tfm@piefed.europe.pub to c/BuyFromEU@europe.pub

1 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The commission is asking for your feedback on open source. Help them to understand the importance!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

From the PDF, one of the EU’s concerns is:

However, much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants.

When tech giants use FOSS, it’s a shame they can extract wealth without compensating the contributors. OTOH, if the baddies become dependent on FOSS, that’s favorable anyway. It means they might contribute code to the projects which otherwise would not happen.

The PDF does not cover public schools specifically. They need to be told that public schools are the most important place to deploy FOSS. Consider a university in Denmark pushes commercial software on students (sadly, they provide that software on a campus webpage improperly titled “Free Software” b/c it is gratis for students). The damage is of course that Denmark educates people to be dependent or clung-onto closed-source software like MATLAB, not GNU Octave. That negative training means the young generations are being conditioned to favor non-free software.

FSFE does not know about this?

The FSFE has a newsletter for “public money → public code”. They have not mentioned this /have your say/ page. Strange.

Downvotes?

I get why the OP was downvoted here.. this is a bit off-topic for BuyFromEU. But !ETS@europe.pub has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.