Sounds like we need a European software agency then. While these projects are technically independent of the EU, Ariane and the A400M are great examples of European collaboration.

We need the same for software: create a company/agency/institute, fund them appropriately (the A400M had a development cost of over 20 billions to give a ballpark figure) and ask them to produce an OS, a browser and an office suite. Make sure it's done with a product mindset, that they have ownership of it. Pay market rate for the employees. And within a decade we could have a credible alternative to Apple/Microsoft, then we can mandate the different EU administrations to switch to this software stack.

The biggest road block I can foresee is the infighting about how to "fairly" distribute the jobs. My worry is that instead of having a couple of locations that can each focus on a key aspect of the project, we would end up with 27 offices, with all the siloing that it entails. Which is literally one of Ariane's greatest weaknesses...

I've long wished Red Hat would open some kind of consumer/business facing market. Fedora is already so damn close, it just needs a little bit more love. Red Hat could partner with Framework, or Lenovo, or Dell for the hardware. Red Hat is already so connected with various stakeholders (Linux Foundation, Gnome, etc) that they wouldn't even have the huge barrier-of-entry of herding all those cats.

The EU funding or putting out an RFP or something would be amazing.

> The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.

its also very little compared with how much they spend on US suppliers.

It also does not address the issue of private sector dependence on the US.

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system

What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.

Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon.

As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).

Well, you could also decide to pay a linux distribution of your choice.

KDE is a German project, GNOME a French/German project, most of Debian's maintainers come from the EU, Manjaro is a German project, probably most Arch, NixOS and Alpine maintainers come from the EU as well...

The problem with open source projects is always "unopinionatism". The only project that comes to mind where the design language feels actually integrated are KDE Plasma (not before) and maybe elementaryOS.

But those projects need a lot of funding to come to feature parity with Microsoft's and Apple's alternatives. Especially in the enterprise/corporate product portfolio, and system landscape administration.

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors

Google's Android is the largest OS by usage.

But yes, you're right. When you try to use a non-US OS in France you end up buying US hardware and erasing your data on the next LineageOS release.

We need vendors.

They gotta start somewhere, no? It is going to be extremely difficult (maybe even close to impossible) to dislodge the incumbents, doesn't mean they shouldn't try

> While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

I think that's good. It prevents forming monopolies and makes use of open standards more often.

Microsoft's push to the cloud and subscriptions for core stuff... outlook, word, excel, is so bizarre and filled with hubris.

An org can now transition everything to Linux locally, and only be left with these fully functional blockers.

That's a good step. And a there are vendors supporting Linux.

You can be sure such vendors would firm that up with a government sized buy.

Linux support is flawless, as long as you select supported components. And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.

There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them.

Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.

The EU could set up something publicly run at first, creating (software) contracts which let chunks of the system get run by small, focused, competitive European businesses who could focus on, say, running a data center in France, providing blob storage services, managed Postgres or whatever...