Petition Summary: The petitioner calls for the European Union to actively develop and implement a Linux-based operating system, termed ‘EU-Linux’, across public administrations in all EU Member States. This initiative aims to reduce dependency on Microsoft products, ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and promoting transparency, sustainability, and digital sovereignty within the EU. The petitioner emphasizes the importance of using open-source alternatives to Microsoft 365, such as LibreOffice and Nextcloud, and suggests the adoption of the E/OS mobile operating system for government devices. The petitioner also highlights the potential for job creation in the IT sector through this initiative.
the eu is a pet the US keeps close. this will never happen.
Well, what better way to embrace FOSS than dismissing the efforts of all the existing distro maintainers? Welcome to the community, guys. Good luck building your cathedral next to the bazaar!
How about they instead work together with the distros and create a way of certifying a distro as gov-ready?
They say nothing about their distro having no upstream. If they make a distro based of Debian/Arch/Fedora I don’t see that as dismissing their efforts anymore than Nobara/SteamOS/Ubuntu/Mint does.
I rather they enforce their requirements on their own spin then try to force existing distros to implement said reqs. They should obviously donate to the foss community when using the technology the community maintain though!
Does Ubuntu “dismiss” Debian? Or Manjaro “disregard” Arch?
An EU-backed and funded distro released under the GNU license would mean that the government can now fund developers and maintainers to have a distribution that will comply with privacy and security requirements.
How much of Ubuntu’s funding goes to supporting debian? I actually don’t know.
I don’t, for example, see Ubuntu listed here: https://www.debian.org/partners/
This is dumb. Hand over development to bureaucrats? create a set of guidelines and requirements, and allow distros to be certified, and fund development of distros that are being used.
I don’t know how it works with a frequently updating OS. In my mind beaurocrats can become asses about certifying one exact version they inspected and then making users afraid that open source community can inject the next version with viruses and they can’t be sure it’s okay too. Ah, and making each certification a paid service and somehow fucking it up.
In Russia there are like two projects of local Linux with custom wine that you can buy just like other software, certified by FSB for sensitive business (I believe them being the first pieces of software to get it except specific cryptographic stuff), but I feel the reason it’s getting adopted and certified is because there are some nepotism and illegal connections with money not really changing pockets.
100% I can imagine they don’t want to rely on third parties to develop their distribution, but, realistically, all the software that keeps the system going will be developed by “randos on the internet” still, so might as well hand over all the development effort to who has the knowledge already, while providing funds/grants
It would make so much more sense to fund existing Linux development than making a new distro, tbh.
If the EU changed to Linux systems and donated the same amount back to open source development as they currently pay for Microsoft licenses, that would make a hell of a difference.
If they really expect the average white collar worker to learn Linux they probably should touch some grass
There’s literally nothing to learn 💀. They will continue using same special app that their employer provides. They won’t be able to fix any issues by themselves still because they werent able to fix these issues on windows either, so nothing is gonna change in this department.
Honestly, in a managed environment, there’s not really much learning to do. All the hard part of learning Linux is dealing with system issues, or when shit breaks. In corporate land, you’ve got IT staff for that.
The biggest hurdle would be learning libre office, but considering the average white collar level of mastery of MS office is pretty poor, the basics really aren’t that different in LO.
Exactly, for the pencil pushers it’s going to be a transition from one desktop and office suite to another. Hardly “learning Linux”.
I see more of a challenge on sys admins and department IT support who may have gotten comfy giving mostly Microsoft product support.
I see it generating less work for the helpdesk than Windows currently does. Linux can hardly brick itself without root while Windows can and has a lot of bloat and problems occuring on random on identical PCs. It also works fine on HDD and with less than 8GB of DDR3 RAM, so older hardware won’t become garbage that quick. And since users aren’t yet familiar with any Linux, there is a 5 year lag between deployment and when average users would start to dig in settings and customization parameters fixing\breaking things themselves like they do on their home machines.
It’s investing in your own working future.
There is no learning curve. Where have you been over the past 7 or 8 years?
Ain’t no way that’s getting accepted. It’s like asking to completely destroy and rebuild one of the EU countries.
They’re already putting out a petition so they’re not wholly against the idea of an EU-Linux.
Also, this has been done before by other governments, like parts of the UK’s and many Indian governments.
I think it’d be a big step, but a doable one and for the better.
Why do you compare it to destroying and rebuilding one of the EU countries, if I may ask?
Why do you compare it to destroying and rebuilding one of the EU countries, if I may ask?
Because destroying and rebuilding the digital infrastructure is very similar. It’s extremely expensive and causes a lot of breakages in the process.
most software is web based and OS-agnostic so there is no destruction and rebuilding happening, and for everything else, FOSS is literally free. How is it expensive to switch from X with a monthly cost to X that is free? Even if things breaks initially, the cost would equalize and long-term be considerably reduced.
