Discussion on Hacker News: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source | Hacker News
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I like it when these things are explained a bit more at lenght:
In a “Call for Evidence” published this week, Brussels says the EU’s reliance on non-European technology suppliers (read: US tech giants) has become a strategic liability, limiting choice, weakening competitiveness, and creating supply chain risks across everything from cloud services to critical infrastructure. The consultation, which will run from January 6 to February 3, is an early move toward a formal strategy on “European Open Digital Ecosystems,” which would treat open source as core infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.
According to the Commission, dependence on foreign vendors makes it harder for Europe to control its digital stack, potentially opening the door to security and resilience issues in sensitive sectors. Open source offers a way out of that bind by underpinning "a diverse portfolio of high-quality and secure digital solutions" that can act as viable alternatives to proprietary platforms, the EC said.
“A strong and developed open source sector can effectively contribute to further EU innovation and accelerate standardisation, strengthening the EU’s international competitiveness, preserving its sovereignty, and ensuring its continuous economic prosperity, security, resilience, and global influence. Innovators, startups and small to medium-sized enterprises are significant drivers as they bring innovative open source-based products and solutions to the market,” the Commission said.
By the Commission’s own reckoning, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of modern software relies on open source components, which means it already props up the digital economy whether anyone likes it or not. Brussels’ gripe is that Europe does much of the building, while the commercial and strategic value too often ends up in the hands of big tech companies based elsewhere.
(From Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech • The Register [emphasis mine])
… sounds like a typical user griping about big tech - but the user just happens to be big too. Nice that Open source gets some recognition, though.
[Btw. Yes, you can go and leave a comment to the EC website - it’s open until 3rd of February!]
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I think the tipping point for EU was this shocking ICC (International Criminal Court) affair which was further related in an interesting opinion article published by The Register back in Nov:
The immediate news was that the International Criminal Court was banging the gavel on Microsoft’s productivity software and moving to an open source alternative. A revenue nothingburger to the Redmond massive, but it signified a huge loss of control, the ICC had been sanctioned by Trump because it had followed its own rules and found Israeli leader Netanyahu had a case to answer. ICC leadership then found itself locked out of the organization’s Microsoft accounts.
Not only did this make a move away from Microsoft seem inevitable, it likely ruled out any other service dependent on an American company. It ruled out any service, local or not, that depended on American cloud infrastructure. It signals to anyone outside the US that if they annoy Trump, their services and data might be out of their control. No American company can say otherwise. Every non-American organization that escapes validates the escape route.
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I didn’t hear about that but I think it tells you everything you need to know about why Big Tech is a problem and why libre technology (hardware, software, services) is important.
That’s not a comment on the merits of the specific case or the specific US administration (which most definitely belongs in another topic if anyone wants to go down that rathole) but on the mere fact that this is even possible i.e. that we as a society have ceded that level of control to a bunch of mega-corporations who have their own interests as a priority (as they should).
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