Untill 3 February the European Commission is collecting feedback and opinion on Open Source
The Commission invites input from open source communities, developers, companies, public administrations, industry, and research institutions. Stakeholders are specifically asked to identify barriers to open source adoption, demonstrate the added value of open source and share suggestions for concrete EU level measures to strengthen the ecosystem.
By my understanding everybody is invited to do so (give feedback) but via registration or social media account. No adds for products (I guess also not Zorin) and trying to follow and answer these questions:
More specifically, stakeholders are invited to reply to the following questions:
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the EU open-source sector? What are the main barriers that hamper
(i) adoption and maintenance of high-quality and secure open source; and
(ii) sustainable contributions to
open-source communities?
What is the added value of open source for the public and private sectors? Please provide concrete examples, including the factors (such as cost, risk, lock-in, security, innovation, among others) that are most important to assess the added value.
What concrete measures and actions may be taken at EU level to support the development and growth of the EU open-source sector and contribute to the EU’s technological sovereignty and cybersecurity agenda?
What technology areas should be prioritised and why?
In what sectors could an increased use of open source lead to increased competitiveness and cyber resilience?
Could you let them know that Canada should be informed to make some similar changes as well? That'd be great
In all seriousness it's a good thing to see them looking into. Even if it might not lead to anything in the short-term, with the current political climate as it is, I think everyone should be looking into these things. Mind you, everyone should've been looking into this much more than just now, but that's how the world works.
I suspect all the "friends" that Trump (and by extension the USA as a whole) hasn't yet attacked are doing absolutely nothing about their respective lack of digital sovereignty.
They haven't been in enough punch-ups, so it takes a punch in the face before they raise their guard.
To be fair, it's a multi-decade endeavour. Sure, they could flip to NextCloud and LibreOffice (or similar) fairly quickly - but the resultant productivity decline would be very expensive. And that's obviously just two products. It'd take a few years to level out, and a few more years to make something comparable. I despise Microsoft as a company, but their "all-in" enterprise ecosystem is very difficult for overpaid managers in big business or government to detach from. Then you have the problem of IBM/RedHat. RedHat is huge in the enterprise Linux space - far bigger than SuSe or Ubuntu. Maybe that is less difficult... Ubuntu is UK-based (i believe), SuSe is EU-based (i believe). Both are very capable, obviously, and SuSe and RedHat share lineage (i believe). As you can tell, i've spend much time researching, and i'm not just going off what i believe to be the case
No, they will not. This has been discussed before. The good news is: Any user can install their preferred browser quite easily.
The ZorinGroup only needs a Base Default Browser that checks all the boxes. One present on the system.
But choosing one will not please everyone. I have my own reservations against Brave Browser and do not use it.
Yes, there has been little incentive to reduce dependency on U.S. controlled technology stacks over the decades.
However, the current state of affairs is such that even the threat of a punch in the face (Greenland) can serve as a reminder that detaching from that dependency is the wisest course of action.
This may lead to more proactive steps for a more unified European approach to self reliance.
Some corrections in what you believe. Ubuntu is from South Africa, owned by Canonical and funded by billionaire Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu is a Zulu word which translates to "I am who I am because of those around me", which was great in the early days but now they have turned into the same type of monster as Gnome.
SuSE Linux (from Germany) is owned by Novell Software who originally was part of a six-distro 'consortium' that would challenge any legal attempts by Microsoft to challenge the validity of GNU/Linux, but they chickened out and made an agreement with Microsoft not to sue them for stealing IP of Novell Netware which is what MS had done with its Windows for Workgroups 3.11 if they didn't take legal action over their GNU/Linux.
The problem with IBM who now own Red Hat want to be the Microsoft of the Linux World which would be bad for the community as Red Hat were behind forcing the adoption of systemd and Pulse Audio across other distributions. Additionally, whilst not directly involved with the development of Flatpak directly, Herr Poettinger who brought systemd and pulse audio to the table and attended a flatpak developers meeting, convinced Red Hat to adopt it, who, in turn had again attempted to force the widespread use of Flatpak to replace APT. Let us also not forget that Red Hat had desired to remove /etc completely which would have prevented me from getting my surround sound system to work.
The problem is all down to money and threats from Microsoft. The other is a lack of enough Linux specialists with server and network experience.
In my city there was a Liberal Democrat MP who had run a GNU/Linux business and was part of a Committee to look at adopting GNU/Linux in government. Nothing has changed and now he sits in the House of Lords (=Senate). Nothing changes when it comes to self-serving politicians.
I also think there is an issue of restricting it to Open Software, when they should be looking at Free Software. There is a fundamental difference.
I'm aware of the history of Ubuntu/Canonical - but Canonical operates out of London, and has done so for many years.
Novell went defunct in the mid 2010s. Last i read, SuSE was owned by a private equity firm (late 2010s). But i just checked, and it looks SuSE went public in the early 20s, and have since de-listed after a predictable share price drop (private equity tends to pump and dump businesses). Now headquartered in Luxembourg.
From my perspective, Europe needs to pour money into SuSE and Canonical with an unofficial ban on IBM/RedHat for government contracts. While they're at it, they need to provide funding for desktop linux... it doesn't even need to be much. Imagine if Gnome, KDE and a few dozen critical desktop-centric software stacks got, say, between 100k and 1 million depending on the size/criticality of the stack. It'd cost Europe about 10 million bucks. They can bill X and Facebook
Thanks for correcting me. I wonder how long it is before Canonical moves to Luxembourg like SuSE! I strongly suspect SuSE made the move to Luxembourg for Tax Evasion like Vodafone does (source Private Eye).
In respect of DE's I think Gnome is out of the question, as it does not offer a familiar desktop interface for Windows migrators. KDE offers a better interface with clipboard content in the system tray but in an Enterprise environment I would suspect various items for mere home users would be disallowed, after all the workplace is to just work, not look at different wallpapers all day. The argument that Gnome should be the OS of choice for accessibility reasons can no longer be justified as many KDE Plasma distributions include Orca and Scaling. Plasma has a better font management setting method for system-wide use which is what I have done for my eldest on MX-Linux 23.1 KDE Plasma.
I suspect SuSE will be the main runner for this as they offered S.L.E.D. for quite some time or the use of local software engineers who devised systems for municipalities in Germany could be adopted as the model for E.U. use. As I have said before, politicians are self-serving and make choices based on what the business world uses or have loose ties with that other OS provider which is what happened with Munich. Change of politician at the helm undid all of Munich's shift to GNU/Linux.
Perhaps they should be more radical and use the difficult to run Hurd from Stallman, what GNU was originally written for.
