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).
They should also fund the projects that they're using. Then everyone benefits.
Agreed... And they will. They will want functions that are stable and works... They can easily put some funds into that...
Public money, public infra and public funding? :)
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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
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.
Spread it around with every German you know. Or even post on Germany related communities
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@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
Isn't sailfish proprietary?
I had to double check. It's based on Linux and Open Source Software, but the UI is proprietary.
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?
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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.
Yeah, I don't disagree with that. Just wanted to highlight that strong software projects are not enough.
I work in SW for a device vendor and I see how much communication there is between OS, vendors and everything in between.
Nokia, Fairphone, Volla. All EU Vendors.
2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe
Motorola too to add on
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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.
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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?
There's the Pixelfed app, Pixelix and PixelDroid. Of the three I'd say the most functional is PixelDroid, but the interface isn't as good as the others. Pixelix feels faster than Pixelfed but in my phone it has an issue with JSON saying I'm unauthenticated.
The Pixelfed app works, but it's a bit slow, and doesn't have as much functionality as PixelDroid. PixelDroid lets you easily see all feeds (feeds for people you follow, local and global feeds), which Pixelfed somehow doesn't let you access, which kinda destroys the point of using a federated social network.
Interesting I'll check them out appreciate the suggestion too
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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.
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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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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.
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I mean yeah. Trump could tomorrow make some idiotic statement about tariffs on American cloud services like aws. Seriously, who would be surprised?
Before Trump, nobody would even suggest to distance themselves from the USA. Now, everyone is thinking it.
Great job I guess, if you want a planet where countries are fighting eachother instead of working together. But Trump mentality is that he must be the winner, always. He cant understand that sometimes another country being winner also helps his own. He must be the winner.
He is the typical guy in the sandbox that takes the entire sandbox because its all about him.
Your comments are not wrong, but also Trump is not the sole issue here. There would still be a problem even if he was removed from office today.
Proprietary software and services are an issue regardless of which government jurisdiction they fall under. It's a good idea for the EU to be moving to open source instead of proprietary solutions based in the EU.
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After so many decades of being reliant on US proprietary tech, now they're moving away to foss?!
Sounds excellent but I'll remain reluctant until I see wide scale adoption.
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