alt Hacker NewsPolitics should never drive technical decisions unless the people involved actually understand the technology. When policy is made without that expertise, open source becomes a political slogan instead of a sustainable ecosystem.
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> Politics should never drive technical decisions
This can never be true. Politics drives all decisions.
National politics may not. But assuming technical decisions are made on an aethereal plane above humanity is just assuming away complexity. It's the excuse of a technical team that developed something superb for no actual user.
I actually think it's a great idea to minimize government dependence on specific vendors at a policy level.
Perhaps these policies shouldn't be too detailed, but signing away future freedom ('nobody ever fired for choosing $entranched_bigcorp') should not be the path of least resistance for decision makers.
At first your comment reads as negative, but you actually like this "call for evidence" then, as they're explicitly asking for feedback about it? Not sure why it reads so negative when you're actually seemingly agreeing with the submission.
What the European Commission is doing is the right thing, then.
It is a "call for evidence", not a directive. It can be summarized as: for our software needs, we depend too much on non-EU countries, we heard about this open source thing, will it solve our problem?
They studied the political aspect (dependence on non-EU countries), that's their job. They are now asking experts about the technical aspect.