do your own homework

Posted Jan 8, 2026 10:42 UTC (Thu) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274)
In reply to: do your own homework by taggart
Parent article: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

I believe one of the most obvious reasons why it's been so much back'n'forth with FOSS in the public sector is that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon (#MAGA?) has an enormous pile of money they can spend on lobbying politicians.

For a politician, taking a path which deviates considerably from what people are used too is a hard sell for them to convince the voters that this is a better path. In the 80's and 90's, there was the saying that "You'll never get fired for choosing IBM". Today, that has changed to the Big Tech companies mentioned above.

There are quite few FOSS based companies who are strong enough to compete against the lobby capabilities of the large Big Tech companies. Red Hat/IBM is probably the largest one these days. And IBM most likely pushes that "responsibility" to Red Hat. But there is only so much Red Hat can do alone without support from others as well.

No software is free (gratis). Someone need to spend time developing it and maintaining it. So funding is clearly important. Politicians understands this. That's why large FOSS based companies are crucial to be involved in these discussions with the EU. Because these companies can at least provide some more credible numbers to EU politicians of the cost of running a FOSS software stack.

And another related aspect, which Big Tech can push hard on is the support side. Getting an software stack infrastructure up and running is just one piece of the puzzle. Having a sustainable and reliable support channel when something breaks must also be considered.

For example, Microsoft provides an enormous software stack - going from the OS to the core software components politicians need to do their work, and there is a lot of expertise they can offer if something breaks. Microsoft can give the politicians a concrete number of the cost of using that stack. (Whether these numbers are correct in practice, is a different discussion).

For FOSS, you need companies like Red Hat to provide a similar number - because no politician will start digging into all the various components needed for them to be able to do their job and calculate a cost spread across thousands of open source projects and then figure out the expertise need for the maintenance and support. That won't fly well, and they won't really task this to their expertise groups if they don't initially believe it's worthwhile.

And I think that's why FOSS struggles to get a strong foothold within the public sector. Those few companies who can provide a functional "solution package" based on FOSS are drowning in the lobby efforts of the large Big Tech companies. And then the cost of a FOSS solution is not seen as credible by politicians.

Politicians need to be given a simple, clear and convincing answer to their complex need with a clear price tag.

In that regards, the current world political situation is shaking the cage enough for politicians to actually look at alternatives - due to the way the Trump 2 administration operates - it is clearer that depending too much on the US based Big Tech is making it too risky for EU in a longer run, Europe gets in a vulnerable position. That is what EU politicians begins to realize now.

The paradox is that Red Hat is a US based company owned by IBM, which gives Red Hat a huge downside to their credibility against the other US based Big Tech companies. On the other hand, what Red Hat brings to the table is a software stack not really owned by them, but is more a collection of independent open source software projects. So if shit its the fan for Red Hat in the future, it is possible to escape a vendor hostage situation. For FOSS companies in Europe, this might be a golden opportunity - but it will be hard to compete against a de-facto FOSS company as Red Hat has become over many years. It is not impossible though, by putting efforts into following what Red Hat delivers today and the direction they're taking - to shadow that for a bit and build up expertise and credibility for the future.

Organizations like FSF, Software Freedom Conservancy and similar FOSS advocates only provides a guidance to where too look and why to consider FOSS from an angle which doesn't really provide a "software stack with a price tag" answer to politicians. These organizations provides more to the philosophical aspects to the discussions rather than a concrete software stack solution.

Politicians won't start throwing money at FOSS projects unless they see a clear win in it. The FOSS projects themselves are not unified in a way where they can convince politicians that they have the best option for them. They need someone in front of them who can handle the business politics and provide a unified solution across all the needed projects. And this organization can start sponsoring concrete FOSS projects.

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do your own homework

Posted Jan 8, 2026 14:22 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

But this is where groups like the E-FSF have an important role. While I hate suggesting the big consultancies should be handed more power, the EU should be demanding that government projects either do a lot of software stack work in-house, where they will use FLOSS software as a matter of course (and gain experience with it) or, given the propensity of governments to outsource, they need to demand joint copyright in all work written for them and get consultancies to build it for them.

Either version would result in a very good outcome, real supported software (either in-house or via a contract with a consultancy), plus hopefully consultancies employing or placing on retainer the software maintainers. For example, LibreOffice is tied up with - is it Collabra? - which comes over as being a support consultancy for LibreOffice.

If people like this (even American foundations, provided they open a European office to support European contracts) can get contracts that expand, that will achieve many of the EU's aims.

Cheers,
Wol

do your own homework

Posted Jan 8, 2026 17:39 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

For FOSS, you need companies like Red Hat to provide a similar number - because no politician will start digging into all the various components needed for them to be able to do their job and calculate a cost spread across thousands of open source projects and then figure out the expertise need for the maintenance and support. That won't fly well, and they won't really task this to their expertise groups if they don't initially believe it's worthwhile.

This is where the civil service needs to get involved. If a politician really wants to think about replacing proprietary software with FOSS, they should consult their own in-house experts. Politicians may not have the expertise or motivation to figure out what it would cost to develop their own FOSS solution, but governments do have large IT departments that have the expertise needed to answer those kinds of questions. Maybe some of those experts are in the pockets of Big Tech and will inflate the cost, but I'm sure some of them are just as fed up dealing with Big Tech as the rest of us and would love to replace everything with a FOSS stack that's under their control.

I would even suggest that hiring FOSS authors as civil servants is a practical alternative to hiring some big tech company like Red Hat. For the price they'd pay a big tech company like Red Hat- much less what they're currently paying to Microsoft, Google, et. al.- a national government could probably afford to hire dozens or even hundreds of their own developers. That would be plenty to make their own customized version of an existing distribution that would serve their specific needs.

do your own homework

Posted Jan 9, 2026 9:31 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

If the EU commission doesn't want to give money to IBM/RH for FOSS maintenance, then there's SUSE as a European option. I haven't really followed SUSE, but going from wiki they don't seem to do that well, with them being acquired over and over and then ultimately being delisted from the stock exchange due to doing so badly.

In any case, be it SUSE or something else, some kind of umbrella organization is probably needed for this kind of maintenance effort. It doesn't seem sensible that some individual maintainer of shadow-utils or whatever needs to write an application, multiplied by every small but still critical project.

do your own homework

Posted Jan 11, 2026 14:09 UTC (Sun) by poruid (subscriber, #15924) [Link]

The Netherlands in 2006 officially declared a policy (Nederland Open in Verbinding, Ministry of Economic Affairs) that open source software and open standards are mandatory unless there are strong specific reason to not adhere (comply or explain).

In practise this policy has been disgustingly well frustrated by the incumbent closed source providers. Also at that time a (good) architecture was published for all governmental bodies (public sector) and an ICT organisation was instituted that centralised much of the work and knowledge (Logius, formally known as GBO). Not long after this, Microsoft got an arguably non-compliant order for initially 50.000 desktops (misnamed Desktop Goud, gold). From there on things seem to have become only worse, e.g. in terms of vector lock-in.

Strange as it may seem, organisations like Logius have, or should have, the required resources to assemble and maintain the software stacks needed by governmental organisations, based on FOSS, mostly anyway. Countries like France have already invested more on such stacks and with more cooperation within the EU good progress should be possible. Most certainly if the prevalent IT culture changes, be it for geopolical reasons.