European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
103 points by fs111
103 points by fs111
Wrote this on there myself a few days back.
As a software engineer working in public service broadcasting within the EU I'd like to see communications tooling prioritised. Even in organisations where robustness and sovereignty are prioritised at great expense it's commonplace for groupware to be the weak link in the chain. So even where great pain is already taken to build a public software service using open source software components, and then deliver it using the organisations own data centres within national borders, the collaboration necessary to maintain that service will typically be dependent on proprietary software services sourced from America.
Get rid of Teams and give me a Linux laptop and we'll have 80% of the remaining proprietary US dependence covered.
As for the last part, I recently ran into this https://eu-os.eu and would love to find some spare time to actually PoC this setup and see what need to happen.
The timing is great, but I'm a bit afraid this will go the way all such initiatives have gone in the past: ignored, lobbied away and getting bypassed by deals struck on the golf course.
That is getting more difficult with the current US policy and most big-tech being from the US. We may have a chance this time
Yeah, this talk covers many reasons why this time might be different: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
I understand the pessimism, but the EU has actually substantially started funding open source and is currently planning to build a larger fund. They are hiring a CEO for that at the moment.
Last I checked the funding is still very "bubble centric" (e.g. AI and cyber security, or whatever will be the buzzword tomorrow). If I'm not mistaken, last year a bunch of funds were also cut that benefited e.g. NLnet.
Did this perhaps change in the recent weeks/months?
I think the EU is well-positioned for long term funding of projects. The problem was always large scale efforts because we don't have a unified market nor easy access to capital like in the US.
I need to sit down and write a proper answer to this
But mostly, while other initiatives from the EUC gives me hope, this one doesn't.
It focused on helping FOSS become a commercial product. This is backward and run directly opposite to what makes FOSS work. As such it will be another useless one.
It focused on helping FOSS become a commercial product. This is backward and run directly opposite to what makes FOSS work.
How so? Developers need to eat and pay rent too. FOSS has never been anti-commercial
I don't want to repeat myself too much, so you can look at my own post about it https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/how-foss-won-consequences
But tl;dr: the IP rules makes it far too cumbersome for users to use commercial relationships at the scale that FOSS is nowadays. In that sense, it is anti commercial. It is probably more precise to say that commerce is deeply opposed to selling software.
Hard disagree. The main issue with FOSS is that it's not "professional enough" for many businesses (as in, hard to get support). And for end users it's often the UI that is (perceived to be) lacking because the commercial alternatives are comparatively better polished due to more A/B testing and whatnot. Proper funding can push OSS beyond just infrastructure usage (where it pretty much dominates) into broad acceptance.
Anyway, I also need to write up a proper answer to this and submit it. Soon!
Where is this an issue when FOSS is already everywhere and won the whole thing?
You are talking of "end-user targeted FOSS" which is a minuscule part of the market and, in general, "user targeted software" is less than 10% of code written. This is nice, but it is not going to have mass scale. It is a niche inside a niche.
Looking at Linux kernel, it is important the Linus Torvalds keeps enforcing the red lines of the project goals written in non-commercial FOSS times, but also the project makes use of its commercialisation to force useful disclosures out of counterparties (mainly hardware vendors).
I think not all FOSS projects are suitable to wide deployments at all (niche user competence expectations, or something like that), and wide-deployability looks to be EU's interest there, but for large-ish-userbase-oriented FOSS there are often things that would be welcome and well-aligned with the project, but nobody gets around to them without payment.
These are such the exception to the rule of FOSS that it is not going to have a massive impact.
A supermajority of FOSS doesn't have the typical problems coming from wide deployment (note that curl has those problems even though not very user-facing); but finding common goals with those projects which do could have a large impact as counted in deployments
I uh ... Yes, yes they do. All my maintainers friends, even of small stuff, have these problems.
It's a valid concern, but I'm worried about the potential for corruption with funding - let's hope that incentives will be aligned properly; it's a truly challenging thing to design a system of support that does not end up corrupted and has the effects it initially set up to have