Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.
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.
The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.
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).
I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies.
The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time.
I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere.
A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.
If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.
Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.
Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.
Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.
True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.
Well most progress in computing, software and related areas did come from private companies.
> True free market competition creates monopolies and
That’s where regulation must come in. To stop monopolies from forming or at least from abusing their position.
Anyway your suggestion is to jump straight to the monopoly phase?
Source: "100 things that never happened"
But of course it depends on how you define “free market competition” (markets are very rarely even close to being free without significant regulation). Entities which end up “winning” almost inevitably do their utmost to restrict any competition which leads to stagnation.
But yes, you're right, a government monopoly where there isn't a natural monopoly isn't a good plan. Funding a whole bunch of small projects might be quite a good plan, though. Sort of like angel investment.
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.
I am primarily thinking about government institutions and corporations. There Microsoft is used almost everywhere.
Mobile phones are a secondary issue in my opinion, also because Android is already much more open than Windows.
See opendesk.eu , it's a platform collaborating with many EU open-source developers, and it's funded primarily by the German government.
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.
What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.
You can't on the one hand maintain the myth that there will somehow be private competition but then on the other set the barriers so high that only the largest most entrenched monopolies can succeed.
Er, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?
Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.
If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.
The end user devices are Windows 11, we use M365, but government services are mostly homegrown and the infrastructure runs on Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (Openshift) software.
Replacing Windows 11 with some kind of Linux and M365 by an MTA is technically feasible, there is political momentum building against US-centric services, but here in Europe politicians are historically highly suspicious of technicians, so nothing gets done yet.
It's a rich country, COTS replaced a lot of technical excellence, but the trend can be reversed as we have bright engineers on the inside still.
In poorer countries and regions, the engineering excellence is way better and they are much more independent.
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.
I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.
But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).
On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.
For many companies, the idea of having the proverbial "One Throat To Choke" is actually a feature not a bug. (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22one+throat+to+choke%22)
The alternative of modular components with interoperable interfaces means more multiple vendors "finger pointing" at each other with the blame game instead of problems getting resolved. Yes, modular components can theoretically combine "best-of-breed" software ... but the extra complexity of interfaces integration is not worth the tradeoffs for many CIOs.
>Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
It goes both ways. A lot of USA companies depend on a big German software company (SAP AG) for their global ERP system. This includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and most of Fortune 500 companies, etc. They all use SAP for consolidated accounting & finance. Google used to use Oracle (USA) but switched to SAP. SAP is an example of a "integrated system" instead of interfacing a bunch of disparate software silos from various vendors ("accounting software vendor", "demand forecasting software vendor", etc)
Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?
This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.
Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
The EU government can provide that.
That would not only compete with Microsoft it could harness the power of small business/startup competition for the individual components which Microsoft can't do.
Japanese keiretsu are a good model to follow here. It was a network of small businesses each of whom held shares in related companies, centered around a bank that provided financing. It was responsible for Japan's economic miracle.
China also did something quite similar which is why they are absolutely dominant in electronics manufacturing.
The EU government doesn't appear willing to do anything like this though. I think they'd rather just get sweet talked by SAP into funneling taxpayer cash into their coffers.
Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.
I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.
No, I am not. That is the stance of the EU. Switching is a matter of European security.
What "people" want is already irrelevant and whether the GUI is consistent or not couldn't matter less.
This! Software is stuck in some illusory ideal from the dotcom days, a global market of meritous choice. It's long been political and about sovereignty, control and security. Some comments above sing the praises of Adobe as a "no alternative" software. So, remember that time when Trump passed an executive order banning Adobe in South American countries [0]?
The US does not get to use access to tech as a weapon, so they're not good enough by wider criteria in a changing political world. It doesn't matter how good are products by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta...
I also happen to think they're technically inferior to a diverse inter-compatible and free ecosystem, but that's becoming a side show.
In a way its good that there are no European vendors. The coming change cannot be mistaken for trade preference. People are being "forced to be free" of dangerous influence [1].
I was assuming, in the context of the original post, that the EU lacks in innovation with regards to operating systems and tried to explain why it is hard to innovate in this area because of the application barrier and due to the fact that viable alternatives like Linux aren't competitive enough.
They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!
They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.
However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.
Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].
Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."
Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.
[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.
Ah photoshop. Every municipality employee uses photoshop at least 5h a day!
The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.
LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.
Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features. Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).
Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.
The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.
- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941) - PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media - and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS
And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...
So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.
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.
No. There is no vendor for this. Such a vendor would need to offer and support everything that MS is offering and supporting.
>And a vendor can easily integrate and ship that.
Integration is hard. It needs to work together. We all know that Linux has some rough edges (and so does Windows) and the vendor has to take care of it all and actually needs to fix it. A company like that has to suddenly do maintenance on many major open source projects.
You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?
My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.
Because there seems to be no alternative.
That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.
I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.
Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.
In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.
50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.
I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
This is not a nice to have. It is about European security.
>> hundreds of companies, but which are good?
most of them, since there is a lot of competition. Competition is good for businesses.
What are the equivalents of Active Directory and the likes of Group Policy? I've seen some compatible/similar tools (like FreeIPA), but they don't seem very popular.
Edit: that’s not a gotcha question or something, I’m genuinely curious about the experiences of people who’ve done deployments like that. I also remember trying to setup Samba to allow some Windows PCs to access storage shares on a Linux box and nothing wanted to work with no obvious error messages. Oh and I have no love for the likes of Kerberos either.
Samba works just fine as a file server. I'm sure there's some intuitive GUI out there (like Synology's) that makes it easy to set up as a file server only. Not sure about a DC.
But even Microsoft wants you to move to Azure AD + InTune. Arguably more secure and flexible.
I think that's good. It prevents forming monopolies and makes use of open standards more often.
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?
The complete package. Hardware, software and ecosystem by a single company. Only Microsoft and Google have anything coming close to this.
Most organisations do not use MS or Google hardware though.
MS can provide everything for a standard office desktop, but the real strength of their OS is the availability of lots of third party software.
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.
Originally, NLNet was *private money* given by the founders of a dutch ISP¨.
Now that this private money run out, they made a partnership with the European Commission, which is *public money* and comes with more strings attached.
Public money is eventually traced back to some elected official who has absolutely nothing to do with technology but is also very emotionally-invested in showing to the constituents that the money isn't being wasted - to the point where spending the money on something useless but concrete ("ergonomic" coffee mugs) might be deemed preferable to a long-term investment that falls on the wrong side of a term-limit.
Again, public money can be fine and completely no-strings sometimes (and, conversely, private charitable contributions can sometimes end up with plenty of strings too), but there's certainly reasons to point out the differences.
I'd LOVE to see more institutions and NGOs move to PeerTube.
The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary, part of the well funded Wikimedia that spends over a quarter of its budget on "Building analytics and ML services" https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
Seems like a well-specified and specific reason for the funding though, not just "do whatever you want":
> This project will develop QA modules for Wiktionary, leading to easy parsing and processing of cross-linguistic data. This helps to unify data formats across Wiktionary, and improve the overall reliability of this invaluable resource.
Given that the EU has 24 official languages, I think it makes a lot of sense to try to contribute resources for improving cross-linguistic data, bonus points for funneling those resources to a relatively open platform.
Edit: if I was to dig a little deeper. What you do need is an operating system for the cloud. Something anyone can run and adapt. With a clear service to service protocol (not http or grpc) and a base set of services that make it useful. Things like proton are nice and we can support them and they run and manage the service. But if you wanted to run that stack yourself, you couldn't. I don't think it's entirely open source. I don't think that's their goal, but you also just couldn't run it yourself. We need this sort of default open model while having a cohesive strategy around how you build something. That is a true alternative to big tech and cloud providers. We are nowhere close to that.
In the EU the size of the state is often bigger than 50% of GDP. What the government buys is very important and means a lot of $$ for projects, consultants and the rest of the open source ecosystem.
If our governments had a way of funding quality software development we would not get the software that we get.
Every now and then they will strike gold with stuff like Blender funding, but even that is peanuts comparably, and only passes through the art/culture channels probably.
My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.
What I don't really get about NLNet is their page titles are all about the Public Nature of the Internet, but the granted projects are all over the place. Not a bad thing, and being overly vague is a necessity to not push projects a certain way, but it hinders clearer communication, I think.
I agree that systems are far from perfect at the time. I also think that governments have been putting money into digital tech for much less time than private enterprise.
Regarding the money that gets to the developers, I added a comment on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770310
The argument of "but very little of that money will go to *actual* development" is not looking at the alternative being used now.
That's a terrifying statistic. It doesn't sound very sustainable.
The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.
Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).
This is beyond ridiculousness.
An AI agent could make a far better job than many well-paid but extremely lazy european bureaurats.
Let alone the corruption, if they choose their friend projects.
I'm pro an unite Europe but current European Union is beyond shame.
I'm currently working on integrating multi-participants video-conferencing in the Movim platform using the NLNet funding system https://nlnet.nl/project/Movim-E2EE-video/
Its super easy to apply and the people are super nice to work with. Also try to find a company that would be interested to implement those kind of features for 5-50K€, they'll laugh at you.
For a tiny bit of "public funding" you get many exciting features on many different open-source projects and initiatives that millions of users are using daily.$
Also NLNet is an independant non-profit organization. No "lazy-european-bureaucrats" there.
> Wikipedia: The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.
SSH Stamp looks very interesting at a glance, but there is no information about a project page or a developer. A search for it with DuckDuckGo does not find any information beyond that page. I wonder if this is real. If there is anything open source about this, it is nothing like the open source projects I know.
They are so far behind. Focus! Spitballing 42 random projects is a luxury Europe does not have.
https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20250421-project-selection-pilots...
There are many search projects you can find like marginalia.nu and Searx, just not in this call round.
I figured that after we were caught bugging Merkel's telephone, Europe would have at least gotten started, but I figured wrong.
You shouldn't rule out the snowball effect of FOSS. The nice thing about this kind of open program is that someone like you that has a beef and a clue can actually propose something, and get a grant to get the party started. After that, communities can kick in.
Ok, that's great and I'm happy for them, how does that help us in Europe though? No matter how decoupled other countries are, doesn't make it less important for others to also eventually get there.
maelito•4h ago