This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Gotta love how all these cunt ass companies are objectively doing worse and losing business present and future for putting mango Mussolini in charge. They can all choke on their avarice.
never trust the americans again
I will be so pissed off when a democrat is elected and every single EU country will try to go back to business as usual
most things will, I doubt this will though.
it's surprising that most countries didn't see this as a national security threat to begin with, but here we are.
I think before the end of the current trump administration we'll see a ban on using Linux within the US out of spite.
them not realizing or caring that 90% of the internet runs on *nixos derived software will only make things more chaotic.
I think that's very likely over. You could argue and people did that one Trump term was just an anomaly. Two is much more difficult to explain away like that and I think Europe gets it now.
Trump, and worse to come, seems an obvious outcome when looking at the unrepresentative two-party system used to divide Americans. Places in Europe use a more representative voting systems, so Europeans aught to know it's a question of when Americans notice 2 options at the ballot is only 1 better than Russia.
Dont worry that will never happen again.
Yeah that's exactly the phrase no-one in the world will believe again for 15+ years
the Nazis could never take power, it just won't happen again.
-- average person around 2014
The U.S. imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court
...fuck this place.
Well the ICC isn't amazing either. Historically it has been used as a tool to "prosecute" African individuals in western courts and has prosecuted literally 0 western war criminals, completely ignoring European crimes abroad. Whether imperialistic/colonialistic or just trying to establish itself as legitimate by prosecuting easy targets, African countries (who were initially all for the ICC because of their history with instability and war and were some of the main case referers early on) are withdrawing because of how "unbalanced" the justice is.
The ICC has never once prosecuted a european national, EVER, for war crimes.
A lot of regimes seeking to get rid of western mega-corporation exploitation are resorting to getting rid of as much western influence as possible, maybe because the frequency of European, american, and corporate sponsored coups.
But the US never recognized the ICC because they commit so many thousands of war crimes.
Yea whatever, they are being targeted becuase Trump wants to defend the war criminal Bibi and the Nazi state Israel
Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
I am in a large (couple thousand staff) company and I cant get why we dont selfhost everything. Like yeah it would have an upfront cost but the savings stack immediately. We spend like 30-50 a user for office access.
Copilot is so shit and we could build an alternative with relative ease and never pay again. It wouldnt be baked into teams but who gives a fuck.
The whole Netherlands? What....?
The government. Read the article
I can explain a major reason why public services and administration are begrudgingly moving to FOSS or OSS at all. They need to apply security standards like ISO 27001 and when they start going through what the documentation requires they realize that most OSS let alone FOSS make it very hard to have any say in the development of the software.
How do you make sure that the security flaws are patched promptly? Do you open a ticket on GitHub and simply hope it gets picked up by the devs? I can tell you from experience that some OSS devs will tell you to make your own merge request if it's so important to you. GDPR makes having vulnerable public facing services very unattractive. What about support for the product when you need something fixed or have an issue with running the software?
You can definitely get a license for an OSS, or get a legal agreement for support from the OSS devs for money. I can guarantee you that when managers in public services look at either patching together and managing a bunch of separate OSS or using Microsofts integrated infrastructure, they see the advantages right away.
That is the sad truth... It's resource intensive and a regulatory problem to create and manage a whole infrastructure. It's much easier to use integrated and centralized solutions.
There is absolutely nothing preventing them from hiring a firm to develop a feature in FOSS. Hell, they can even keep it proprietary if they wanted to.
they can even keep it proprietary if they wanted to.
Yes, with the caveat that it would have to be an internal piece of software, or if it's a public facing tool then it would have to be under a non-copyleft licence. But yeah, for 99% of use cases they could have a proprietary fork.
Commercial support or if it's critical enough infrastructure have a full time department/team to do it. Commercial support is the obvious choice for most countries starting out tbh.
Honestly SuSE, Ubuntu, and Hetzner all have good for enterprise support and its crazy that they don't have more major gov business in the EU now.
But honestly yeah, pay for labour to maintain things. It's not a breaking new idea. You can do that AND own the things instead of renting from private companies too. Also not a new idea.
The only thing new is that we are talking about computers and we have museums for them already so maybe get with the times, right?
How do you make sure that the security flaws are patched promptly? Do you open a ticket on GitHub and simply hope it gets picked up by the devs?
No you dont expect free labour and pay them.
With non-free software, you have no say at all.
The problem you point out has been known in the Linux community for literally decades and is the reason why Red Hat Linux was created and any company can, right know, get an Enterprise version of it with an Enterprise support contract.
That said, over the years I worked in seriously large multinational companies which used Linux and other open source products like Apache extensively on the server side (pretty much all such machines had it) so at least on the server side things did change massively from back in the day when companies would get Sun servers with SunOS or IBM server with Minix rather than generic server PCs with Linux due to that rationale you stated.
In fact, it has also become a common thing in much smaller companies, though maybe not the small and micro-sized ones.
The reality on the ground at least on the server side and for infrastructure software is that companies did find a way to deal with the problem of not being able to get support contracts from many of the OSS apps makers, and did so either by just paying some company specialized in supporting it or by having their own developers - after all, it's exactly the thing with OSS that any developer can change it hence you're not limited to paying for support from a specific company that makes the software.
Don't get me started about ISO. They can go fuck themselves.
But that particular standard doesn't apply to software. It applies to a company. Its a best practices, audited authoritative report. None of that means the software doesnt have backdoors, flaws, issues, its how they handle them.
Microsoft is a known ISO cheater, and will pay off companies or at least influence them, so I wouldn't trust ISO or the auditors.
So now, any company that is willing to take on the challenge of being certified can use open source software (which actually is audit-able as opposed to Microsoft's).
Seems like there is a path forward. Yes they may have to fund a project that helps audit, develop, or maintain critical software. If its open source, you have an entire world could also participate in securely developing software, in the open.
I'm in a local administration in France, it's rapidly getting closer to home... Our higher-ups somehow decided a thourough Microsoft integration was a good idea like 5 years ago.
Seems like we're just one political comment about support to the ICC to be in the same situation. And I mean, fuck it, we should be. But I am not happy about the shit we'll have to go through to purge it all now.
US: Let's sanction everyone everywhere all at once!
Also US: Why don't people want to be dependent on US systems? 😭
Couldn't undermine the country more if they tried, which makes one wonder.
Yep. Trump's actions are no different than what any bad actor would do if they wanted to destroy the USA without invading it.
Yea we got a bit of the “inmates are running the asylum” situation over here.
In the immortal words of the joker(paraphrased) this country needs an enema
US has been building soft power like this for decades, and Trump is pissing it all away.
If this process to get rid of dependency on US gets well underway, there's no turning that ship. US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
This is not a bad thing. Over dependency on any one nation or even a bloc of nations is a bad thing.
I can’t help but think the dependency on the US that has been created played some role in what’s happening now.
US: You want to cut us off? No! We cut you off!
NL: How petty are you?
US: Yes.
Finally. Been saying for years, NixOS is the obvious choice for a gov distro.
Now we need to convince Canada to do the same. If everyone leaves Microslop, that would make a huge impact.
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it's easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool> and exit when I'm done with it is magnificent.
That's the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I've been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don't work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I'm really stoked about this.
I've been doing a project https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-07-04-a-declaration-of-independence/ ever since Independence Day and I have been shocked by how insane the open-source tooling out there is now. NextCloud and Collabara alone solves 90% of company's needs. ERPNEXT covers a huge swath in mid-range needs. I combine it with a mailcow server and Authentik for SSO and I am not sure how much else most businesses need. The whole stack is zero cost.
Windows is basically a zombie OS at this point, shambling along and eating brains.
All middle powers need to align and collaborate on this. There is limited programming talent and gaps and especially security (ai) gaps need to be filled. EU, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, SK, Japan should actively pool resources.
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. 😒
Neet, if NixOS get used more and more then the skills I acquired making my config will become marketable.
