this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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The commission is asking for your feedback on open source. Help them to understand the importance!

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[–] 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.