1d ago

Open letter: ~100 EU companies urge EU lawmakers to take “radical action” to shrink the reliance on foreign infrastructure by fostering a so-called “Euro stack”.

www.theregister.com Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape US dependency

: Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27088837

[PDF] Letter.
Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions

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It also suggests there should be a formal requirement for the public sector to "buy European" and source their IT requirements from European-led and assembled solutions, while recognizing that these may involve complex supply chains with foreign components.
You know that opensource could solve that for software, right? Then there's no "supply chain" issue. It could be written by the North Koreans for all we care, but it can be copied, audited, or whatever else by European developers.
There are only 37k signature for Public Money, Public Code. We can do better and hopefully convince the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu to listen.
- Most of the govt fees are going to be for service and support, not licensing, so even with FOSS software they would need to find European vendors willing and able to provide everything from tech support to hotfixes to planned upgrades.
  
  Why would you need a vendor? You could support it in house, couldn't you?
  
  Governments are not big monolithic things, at federal, state and local levels there can be hundreds or thousands of users/endpoints to support. Nobody does that in house, even Fortune 500 companies outsource service and support (that’s how companies like RedHat, Xen, etc got so big when they were still making FOSS software). From another angle it’s about risk reduction, since if something comes up you have a vendor to blame.
  
  you could, but governments tend to be particularly inefficient because they’re very risk-averse. everything they do has to be documented, every decision justified
  it’s so risk-averse that it’s a massive risk in fact ;)
  outsourcing allows them to say “but it wasn’t us!”
- Why is this an open letter rather than an EU petition? They should make a petition here, then it'd have more visibility, it'd be legally required for a response to be laid out if it passes the threshold, and people like me would happily sign it knowing exactly who has my personal info.
  https://commission.europa.eu/get-involved/engage-eu-policymaking/petition-eu_en
  
  You could ask them. I think there was a petition, but with meager results. No harm in signing this one.

12 comments