They should also fund the projects that they're using. Then everyone benefits.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
876 points (99.4% liked)
Open Source
42837 readers
93 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Bingo. Even just a small amount of what they were previously paying the US tech firms would mean huge advancements.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
Nokia, Fairphone, Volla. All EU Vendors.
2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe
Motorola too to add on
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
Well, compared to the energy used by the LHC, anyway, the Swiss use mostly Hydro-electric plants for the Energy, normal in Alpine zones. (~65% of Swiss energy is renevable (Hydro, Solar, Eolic). Even used the heat produced by the CSCS.
Anyway, there are tons of EU alternatives, even superior, to US products and services. It's not a tecnically but an political problem to switch, which at least is on the way.
The LHC does not pollute the internet and produces 100s of millions scraping requests. The LHC is a truely glorius enginiering marvel.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
What do Canadians have to do with European tech sovereignty? Why are you trying to hijack this thread?
And for Canadians, what realistic alternatives are you suggesting for everything you've listed?
If you want to be taken seriously, start by proposing an actionable plan.
load more comments
(8 replies)
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
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
But steam isn’t open source? /s
Open steam sauce?
Nah.
Open sauce steam?
Smart, democratic.
While I wish there was an Open Source client, I can only imagine why Valve does not want that. First, it would help fakers and scammers too. Steam has a Scammer problem. Secondly, it could help the competition. At least an official API would go a long way, to enable the community to write their own Open Source client based on the API.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Open source is the only realistic way forward for Europe, since reimplementing popular US platforms from scratch would be a herculean effort. Hopefully there will be a lot more funding and polish for popular projects as a result. Maybe Europe will get serious about using Linux instead of Windows finally.
Clearly it isn't easy to switch away from US corporative services and the way to go is OpenSource and if not, using instead EU products and services. It's still a long way to go, the way is made walking. It's about souvereignity, not depending on greedy US companies, less with this stupid Australopithecus as President. Time to show him the middlefinger, as at least Spain already does.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The EU should also fulfill the double meaning of the headline and buy Valve corporation from Gabe Newell.
Good! One can no longer trust the current US regime.
view more: next ›