alt Hacker NewsThe way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
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I see a "top-down" approach, actually.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
Given how software is largely delivered via SaaS models these days, I'd start with a Chrome OS competitor as a client
And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.