not a moment too soon... we've worked on this back in the early 2000s, then Microsoft steamrolled everything with local government contracts (coughtBRIBEScough) and look how well that turned out.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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In Spain there are more and more shops selling PCs only with FreeDOS to the user choice which OS he want to use. I need to use Windows for several reasons, but it's gutted and debloated to the mere OS (<1GB).
Open source is the only realistic way forward for Europe, since reimplementing popular US platforms from scratch would be a herculean effort. Hopefully there will be a lot more funding and polish for popular projects as a result. Maybe Europe will get serious about using Linux instead of Windows finally.
Clearly it isn't easy to switch away from US corporative services and the way to go is OpenSource and if not, using instead EU products and services. It's still a long way to go, the way is made walking. It's about souvereignity, not depending on greedy US companies, less with this stupid Australopithecus as President. Time to show him the middlefinger, as at least Spain already does.
Yeah, it's going to be a long process realistically, and hopefully there's actual sustained state level commitment to getting that done from the European countries. Frankly, it should've been obvious why it's a bad idea to become so dependent on foreign tech, but better late than never.
@Zerush i am so long waiting for a linux phone, that can be used as daily driver (for everyone!) made in eu! signal, thunderbird, firefox, and i am happy ... the rest i can handle from firefox as webapp...
I would love to see a SailfishOS phone like Jolla's gain more widespread market/sales
I wonder if resurrecting Firefox OS might still be an option. It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.
There's the KaiOS fork, but the direction is not really the same since it's more targeted to low power keypad-based phones... and I believe they replaced much of the Gonk layer with a very stripped down low level Android base which isnt fully open source... maybe if they coordinated with the LibrePhone project and some hw manufacturers (like EU-based Nokia) we'd get a fully free stack.
That was what Chromebooks did as well, isn't it?
It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.
Wasn’t that also the idea with the first iPhone and iOS1 until they realized the potential of native apps?
Did they work on developing new web standards to unlock that potential on the web?
Back then HTMLv5 wasn't even a thing, there was no concept of video/microphone/gyroscope/gps access for webapps, notifications, web workers, web sockets, offline PWA webapps, etc. It was not a viable idea unless they actually were to invest big. They weren't so committed. In Firefox OS even the dialer was a webapp, Mozilla brought forth a lot of innovative APIs to make it possible, many of which are in use today even after the OS was discontinued. And nowadays you even have things like Webassembly that allows you to code it in C or whatever low level language you want.
I feel Apple has always been more interested in their own ecosystem. Opening the web to have the same level of potential as the native apps from their walled garden goes against that strategy, so I don't believe they were really serious about that approach, it's always been more interesting for them to prioritize their native apps.
Do Android next. Please.
A thousand percent yes! Wait wait WAIT BIG IDEA!!!
Everybody listen up, let's all suggest to EU Countries to partner up with PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, & Free Software Foundation's Librephone project so they can all get funding!!
That way they can get made way faster than they are now
You need hardware vendors on board or you'll get nowhere.
Eh, Europe is an important enough market that they could use legislation to get the desired result out of hardware vendors, or something close enough to it. If the EU or a majority of European nations stipulated that everything had to be compatible with open source operating systems I'm pretty confident that it would happen. There would be pushback. Likely they'd claim that it'd impede their ability to turn a profit, create development cost issues, and be extremely insecure, but once things were set into motion they would find a way to make it work.
Nokia, Fairphone, Volla. All EU Vendors.
2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe
Motorola too to add on
Nokia doesn't do phones anymore. HMD Global (Finnish company) bought the Nokia brand for phones and used it but apparently they've switched away from it recently.
That's correct but their old Software Team is still in business, rebranded to Jolla with the SailfishOS. Mostly available to flash on Sony smartphones, or near every Linux phone.
They should also fund the projects that they're using. Then everyone benefits.
Public money, public infra and public funding? :)
Agreed... And they will. They will want functions that are stable and works... They can easily put some funds into that...
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A quick reminder in this context: The German government wants to introduce Palantir nationwide, even though this violates applicable law - both at the European and national levels. Contracts have even already been signed in some federal states.
Here is a link to a Campact petition calling on the SPD to block the CDU/CSU's plans.
In my opinion, everyone living in Germany should sign both petitions - it is scandalous that this is even necessary, but unfortunately, conservative german politicians in particular continue to pursue their shady dealings.
It's an recurrent claim by the right wings, but same as the Chatcontrol, rejected, because incompatibility with the privacy rights in the EU which would be violated with Palantir and the Chat control.. There isn't any reason to introduce the control, because the current law permits an individual chat control in an crime investigation with an court order, but not an global control, which would be the same as open and controlling private cards and correspondence, which obvious is a no go.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/chatkontrolle-eu-deutschland-bmjv-hubig-whatsapp-signal
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/chatkontrolle-eu-justizministerin-100.html
Spread it around with every German you know. Or even post on Germany related communities
conservative german politicians in particular continue to pursue their shady dealings.
and will push their gov'ts back into the microsoft/google fold when they approve purchase of the next big system; and you can only hope that palantir isn't it.
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Yeah Canadians are so serious about boycotting the US, except everyone still uses Mastercard, Visa, Android, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Linkedin, Indeed, FB, IG, etc. etc. They can't even press the free delete account button, what a great boycott! Finally after almost a year only the EU is just beginning to discuss digital sovereignty.
It will happen though everything takes time and effort. Wonder what a Mastercard/Visa open source alternative would even look like though. Facebook alt I am debating making myself with a team of interested people but building it out to see how it would be done
Open Source Alternatives:
- PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, and FSF Librephone (Europe should partner with them all for funding)
- All kinds of AWS, and Google alts for each product: alternativeto.net shows plenty
- A person is making a LinkedIn/Indeed alternative (They posted on the Open Source community here on Lemmy) and want to make a team overtime too
- Stoat for open source Discord alt also a team in place
- A team is working on Flashes (IG Alt)
- Another team on Spark.so (TTok Alt) 2 decent alternatives for now until we get full blown decentralized options
There's pixelfed for an Instagram alternative, which is based on the activitypub protocol. If flashes is built on bluesky I don't think it will make much of a difference if the protocol is controlled by a company.
I completely forgot about Pixelfed. Haven't tried it yet any clients you would recommend for it?
I was trying to look up this discord alternative you mentioned - Stoat, but only found water simulation software, any link?
Here is their alternativeto.net info page: https://alternativeto.net/software/revolt-chat/about/ (Great website to find open source alternatives to other stuff as well)
And here is their actual website: https://stoat.chat/
Well, you can't expect the whole net of dependency to be torn down that quickly when it took decades to be established. Especially if you want a somewhat normal life.
Even before the latest acceleration into fascism I kept looking for alternatives of almost everything I use and the pain is something I've just got used to when it started with switching to Linux only over 20 years ago. Of course I still get envious when iPhone users just quickly AirDrop some pics, so I get why it's not always easy to switch to alternatives.
But alternatives exist. Exploring them has become a lot more mainstream and they get more funding and support.
When you and your wife send pics over KDE Connect instead is a powerful moment. Still requires one phone to connect to the other over hotspot or be on the same network at home, but its slick otherwise.
Wait, KDE connect can go straight from one phone to another? That sounds awesome. I know it's a great piece of software, but that makes it even greater.
Yep, just make sure to set the permissions so you're not sending notifications to the other phone (if it's someone else's) or allowing remote control of yours. Just enable file sharing or whatever you want, and maybe allow them to do the find my phone ring thing.
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I'm interested to see what an open source cloud standard would look like. There's a lot of elements that share functionality between Azure and AWS, but they're just different enough that it's a massive pain in the arse to move from one to the other and you basically have to re-write your Terraform from scratch.
If there was something that was standard so I could write Terraform that goes "I want thirteen microservices all running in docker containers and a message bus with these types of message that lets them communicate" without specifying the exact implementation, I would be a happy camper.
I think #kubernetes might actually be that - they've got a start with the Kubernetes jobs, etc.
Maybe something like OpenStack?
OpenStack with Kubernetes on top probably. Openstack gets you the IAAS, but not PAAS, if I understand Openstack correctly.
This is basically kubernetes with a couple of custom resource definitions, no?
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Thierry Carrez commented, "Did you notice what I didn't talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI."
...
The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure," continued Carrez, "that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments.
He was so close to greatness :(
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