Internal documents reveal European Commission fears over Microsoft dependency
Election of new EDPS might end up deciding future of Commission's Microsoft use.
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the fear is not about Windows but the online cloud service Microsoft365 and yes to offer an European alternative to that service you need shit ton of money to operate a datacenter big enough to offer services without lag or data size problem for millions of users (at least if you want to be a real concurrent to Microsoft365).
on a smaller size, there is Nextcloud in the Open Source space that integrate a lot of tools that Microsoft365 has... So a good start exist for a more privacy solution, but that's on you Brussel to create full time jobs to makes open source MR/PR to improve the scalability and the feature of Nextcloud while staying true to the open source spirit...
We should be worried about Windows as well to be completely honest. But at the very least, it's still more replaceable.
Nextcloud is a great start point, but it's terribly underfunded... as are all of our "alternatives" to big tech companies.
As a GNU/Linux and BSD user I can't be agree more.
For the funding, Brussel as the money... If they decide to reroute the money they spend to GAFAM to their Open Source equivalent projects instead Nextcloud, Mastodon, Peertube, Matrix, etc... would not stay under-fund.
The sad thing is that there was an official Mastodon and Peertube instance that stayed up for years but was highly under-fund itself. The European Commission decided to cut the few funding left in 2024, closing both instance.
Interesting! I was already vaguely aware some of these efforts, but that was still quite informative. Nonetheless, from what I've observed, it seems that these kinds of funding initiatives aren't very popular politically. Most people don't benefit from it enough, and then it's only natural to ask why we are spending, néé, wasting money on them. I think better messaging is needed on these types of issues.
And education would help a lot too - most people don't think about where the software that they are using is coming from and that is a big problem. When you present people with two pieces of software, they don't really give any thought to where those pieces of software came from or how it's made. So they won't be able to understand issues like the fact that vendors can just pull the rugs from under their feet whenever they feel like it. If people don't understand concepts like these, then obviously they won't understand how to avoid these things from happening!
I do think there's hope on the horizon though. If we can brand Microsoft et. al. as American companies and successfully convince people to be more and more skeptical of the USA as a whole, then maybe we have a chance in stimulating people to take more initiative in getting off these products and adopting other ones.