I expect many more projects like this popping up, due to the current geopolitical environment
Perhaps you are instead thinking of trademark protection? Trademark protection, of course, protects trademarks for particular specified industries and is scoped to nations where the holder does business/exists/has jurisdiction.
It's unlikely this will help, but it's 100% certain that copyright ain't gonna apply.
2) Is "American" (or "Chinese", etc.) trademarked?
It seems not worse than e.g an American activist labeling their initiative "The American ________ Project". It's perhaps misleading here because HN's (otherwise good) rules to prevent sensationalism in titles disallows the poster to contextualize a post, except in a comment.
> The choice of Fedora-based Linux distributions or the desktop environment KDE is not a core concern as it does not impact much how admins manage users and their data, software and devices.
> Nevertheless, EU OS cannot avoid to pick one base Linux distribution to start with.
I think the EU Public sector has too much variance in it to be safely serviced by just one distro. Just thinking on the hifdes of legacy infrastructure that needs to be kept integrated (storage, auth, etc).
I think a better approach would be to have a programme in the EU to allow local administration and PS agencies to establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards would go a long way. Couple that with an incentive to utilize small shops for the execution instead of corporations and we might have a chance to emerge from the bug pile of mud that is current Public Sector IT before anybody else in the world.
So while on the surface that Desktop is something that should work with oob Linux parts it ends up being much more involved once you try it.
> https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/interoperable-euro...
and this too
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Fram...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Fram...
quote
Draft Version 2 of the EIF[2] was the subject of a political debate, where the main technology/commercial issues relate to the role of lobbying for proprietary software.[4]
EIF 2 was adopted by the European Commission as the Annex II - EIF (European Interoperability Framework) of the Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services” on 16 December 2010.[5]
"All"? DNS4EU (https://www.joindns4.eu) seems to be progressing reasonably well.
By what metric would that be? Not doubting it but I've heard about it first a few days ago.
No need to worry then, this is not a EU IT project at all, just some Internet rando using a misleading name for their pet project.
Thank god someone said it, there are actually so many of these strange projects that try to promote some improvement for 'their' problems and propose them as required by the EU to adopt, without understanding the complexity that's actually involved in how the EU works. Another example I'm reminded of was last week someone shared their proposal for a unified API to access particular medical data, notably the API was suiting only their needs.
But what bothers me the most is the huburis in assuming they know better and so continue to insult the EU's current systems.
Of course things can be improved, but it's not some start up that you can just break things for 80% of your customers who can't migrate to the next API version.
I think that's THE problem. Every member country has at least one duplicate of some public sector thing (tax agency, property/citizen registry, health registry etc.) and each of them does their thing slightly differently.
> I think a better approach would be to <...> allow local administration <...> establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards <...>.
Part of the problem are data schemas. Even if you mandate some common information exchange format, it is either somewhat opinionated on data schemas anyway or so generic that you need combinatorial explosion of custom middleware to align schemas. You just kick the can of pain down the road and eventually have a bunch of agencies that are in theory connected but cannot exchange data without "a project" anyway.
While slower and more painful to initially deploy, a much more fitting solution would be to have common open core software, enforcing common schemas, but allowing custom extensions/middleware.
You say this as if it is a bad thing, this is part and parcel of how the EU works. It's not the same as a Federal system where there is one way and the rest are derivatives of it. There is more autonomy for each of the EU member states to do things how they want.
The general framework is still based on the same core principles and regulations, therefore cores most of the systems are much more alike than different. The differences come in additional details, where data models can be extended from common core and local workflows and local integrations, where custom development is required anyway. If those custom developments are built on top of common open core, the know-how translates laterally across whole EU and expertise can at the very least be shared.
A proof-of-concept doesn't provide any value. For Linux to gain further adoption a gargantuan effort is needed to get things from 90% done (or 90% working) to fully working. Any Linux distribution is already suitable for government use. Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian. They're all fine distros. The only remaining problem is quality. Things don't work or suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. For government use that's a deal-breaker. It's also a deal-breaker for gamers. Which is why SteamOS has been relentlessly fixing reliability issues. So if I had to bet on a linux distro going mainstream, it would be that one.
Linux is fine for an individual - I've used it for over 25 years no problem.
I have no idea if modern desktop configuration management and centralised identity like mdm/intune/sccm/ad even exist, let alone how well they work in the real world
Your mention of SteamOS suggests that you don't understand the considerations governments and enterprises have in fleet management, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement.
What are you talking about exactly? It's not my experience.
* "Fedora-based" was skipped over. Or it wasn't, but you intuited something else from that term, maybe without the backdrop of Fedora's bootable containers or uBlue. Or with awareness of those tech, but without valuing their contributions to system stability (or the contributions of the broader "immutable"/"declarative" projects) as much as they perhaps warrant.
* You believe a govt end user's notion of "software quality" to matter more than (basically) any other stakeholder's notion. Or you don't recognize as intensely as I that simply having a URL to point at (or more importantly for older bureaucrats: a PDF / PDF printability) is a multiplying force on the ability to get in front of someone who makes policy decisions.
> Is EU OS another Linux distribution that I can try out?
> EU OS is not another Linux distribution. EU OS is a community-led Proof-of-Concept, which employs existing Linux distributions. The challenge of the proof is not that an individual can use Linux on their own computer. Instead, the challenge is to proof [prove] that an admin team can manage users and their data, software and devices with or without Active Directory and without Microsoft Windows within a migration period of rather 2 years than 20 years.
Get rid of consultancy companies and do the change in house. In my experience, consultancy companies solution for everything is to integrate complex solutions (Microsoft, Oracle, ...) an charge as much as possible per hour. They have all the big-tech certifications possible, and that is what they want to implement. It is a the fox guarding the hen situtation.
I’m also confused why they don’t allow non-Linux viable OS alternatives. Some may be better for some uses.
Windows: status quo, dominant on desktop
Linux: investing, dominant on servers
MacOS: American, hates enterprises
ChromeOS: American, limited, uses Linux kernel.
The long tail alternative options include:
FreeBSD/OpenBSD: ditches the Linux kernel but supports much of the Linux software ecosystem
ReactOS: open source windows clone
Haiku: beta, not targeting enterprises
Redox: micro kernel OS written in rust, not ready for production
Seems like the *BSD family is the most viable of these, at least in the short term.
Redox could provide a second-mover advantage with fundamental security upgrades.
But the risk is known: https://xkcd.com/927/
s/standard/distro/g
I used to tell about some library efforts in Germany regarding the use of a SuSE based distro for their infrastructure, to be used by folks at the library.
Turns out that one of the things that got recently replaced, when new computers got in, was exactly that.
Now they run selected Windows apps in kiosk mode, because that was what their users used to complain about not being able to access at the library.
----------
- In the short term, you can launch windows apps as RemoteApp in a hidden vm, and the application feels like a native Linux application in your window manager.
- In the longer term, you can pay 50 engineers to fix LibreOffice, and you still save money.
openSUSE has all their tooling based in EU ground. For example, OBS that is the build service, has the machines around Germany or Prague. A big bulk of the community is EU based, (with very relevant contributors from many other places), and SUSE, the company that is helping (via infra and some packages) is from Germany.
I do not known if sovereignty makes sense in the open source world, as at the end is a joint effort of multiple developers from many (and some times confronted) places, but if it does make sense then I would value more those other criteria.
As of February 2025, the Board has the following members:
Dr. Gerald Pfeifer (Austria), Chair
Ish Sookun (Mauritius)
Jeff Mahoney (United States)
Rachel Schrader (United States)
Shawn W Dunn (United States)
Simon Lees (AustraliaGoing with effing IBM is a really weird thing to do for his "Proof-of-Concept". Debian for its robustness or openSUSE for being distinctly european would have been much more inspiring.
Those distributions are making huge efforts in keeping a core that is 100% reproducible, working upstream to fix issues, and providing reporting and tests tools to detect regressions (for example [2])
This is why a fork is usually a bad approach.
[1] https://reproducible-builds.org/who/projects/ [2] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Reproducible_Builds
It doesn't. I read stuff like this as a way to ride jingoist currents.
Especially not in a software sense as compared to hosting where as a general rule someother jurisdiction than your own is prefarable.
Maybe there is a need for some sort of "Programmer without borders" soon if FOSS turns too much to nationalist quarrel.
> EU OS is not a project of the European Union, but it should be.
Just flagging this because a lot of comment here and anywhere else EU OS gets discussed, end up assuming this is affiliated with the EU in some way.
It's not affiliated in any way, so whatever you feel about this project, and the EU as a political institution, you probably shouldn't infer anything about one based on the other.
The (main) political institutions of the EU are:
- the European Parliament,
- the European Council (of heads of state or government),
- the Council of the European Union (of member state ministers, a council for each area of responsibility),
- the European Commission,
- the Court of Justice of the European Union,
- the European Central Bank and
- the European Court of Auditors.
This is important because of EU's strong stance on privacy. And to protect against takedowns like what happened to the chief prosecutor of the ICC (Trump told Microsoft to block their account).
They don't build from nothing. KDE is a fantastic Desktop Environment, that would be an upgrade in itself over Windows. But if you have like millions of public servants (police, courts, governments, etc), you want to be sure that what they use meet your requirements.
I think this should have been done earlier, but late is better than never.
Listed on the https://eu-os.eu/goals#motivation
> synergy effects lead to tax savings, because there is no per-seat license cost
How much are we talking ? Also there are good reasons that large organisations use enterprise software such as (I think) redHat in this case.. It's dedicated support mainly and security.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, I love open source and absolutely a proponent of its benefits, however I do know when sometimes it's not the right fit.
> independence in scheduling software migrations and potential hardware upgrades
Independence and much higher overhead to ensure everything goes smoothly.
> Edit : It's seems its Windows and not RedHat [0]
[0] https://gitlab.com/eu-os/eu-os.gitlab.io/-/issues/10#note_24...
from norway?
or opensuse from germany.
They are still beholden to redhat in the usa? Makes sense to me.
net01•3h ago
a good exaple is the french gendamerie (police) they are using there own OS GendBuntu > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu a flavor of ubuntu made for taking depositions etc.
all while saving 50 million euros since the start of the prgram and switching 100.000 desktops to it
case study: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/file...
SwiftyBug•3h ago
philipwhiuk•3h ago
messe•3h ago
SwiftyBug•2h ago
pelagicAustral•2h ago
hagbard_c•2h ago
LibreOffice, remember?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
eastbound•3h ago
MockingHawk•2h ago
net01•3h ago
graemep•3h ago
It has various levels of adoption in individual European countries and regions (in the EU and beyond) with a number (such as the UK) making it the standard for document exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption#Europe