Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape US dependency
www.theregister.com
: Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions
  • atro_city@fedia.io
    17·
    10 hours ago

    It also suggests there should be a formal requirement for the public sector to “buy European” and source their IT requirements from European-led and assembled solutions, while recognizing that these may involve complex supply chains with foreign components.

    You know that opensource could solve that for software, right? Then there’s no “supply chain” issue. It could be written by the North Koreans for all we care, but it can be copied, audited, or whatever else by European developers.

    There are only 37k signature for Public Money, Public Code. We can do better and hopefully convince the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu to listen.

      • atro_city@fedia.io
        1·
        4 hours ago

        You could ask them. I think there was a petition, but with meager results. No harm in signing this one.

    • will@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      10 hours ago

      Most of the govt fees are going to be for service and support, not licensing, so even with FOSS software they would need to find European vendors willing and able to provide everything from tech support to hotfixes to planned upgrades.

        • will@lemm.eeEnglish
          41·
          8 hours ago

          Governments are not big monolithic things, at federal, state and local levels there can be hundreds or thousands of users/endpoints to support. Nobody does that in house, even Fortune 500 companies outsource service and support (that’s how companies like RedHat, Xen, etc got so big when they were still making FOSS software). From another angle it’s about risk reduction, since if something comes up you have a vendor to blame.

        • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
          31·
          8 hours ago

          you could, but governments tend to be particularly inefficient because they’re very risk-averse. everything they do has to be documented, every decision justified

          it’s so risk-averse that it’s a massive risk in fact ;)

          outsourcing allows them to say “but it wasn’t us!”