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The quite famous FOSS developer Poul-Henning Kamp (aka PHK) has posted his feedback to the EU regarding European Open Digital Ecosystems [Intro in Danish, article in English] and their call for evidence. In it he brings their attention to open standards in points 2 and 3:
At the most fundamental level, the EU has three options:
1. Pick and bless a set of winners, consisting of:
a) Operating system, portable to any reasonable computer architecture.
b) Text-processing, suitable for tasks up to a book.
c) Spreadsheet
d) Email client.
e) Web Browser
f) Accounting software, suitable for small organizations.and fund organizations to maintain, develop and support the software for the future as open source, turning that software into infrastructure like water, power and electricity, free for all, individuals, startups and established companies alike, to use and benefit from.
2. Continuously develop/pick, bless and meticulously enforce open standards of interoperability, and then "let the competition loose".
3. Both. By providing a free baseline and de-facto reference implementations for the open standards, "the market" will be free to innovate, improve and compete, but cannot (re)create walled gardens.
Indeed, if the protocols and file formats are not publicly documented, freely available, and royalty-free, then what benefit would there be to implement them, FOSS or not?
There is an unreproducable javascript link on the EC page which goes to a relevant PDF document. It is labeled, "Call for evidence - Ares(2026)69111". It is worth checking before sending in feedback. Although English is the main language, the other official languages of EU member states can be used. The deadline for feedback is 03 February 2026.
Previously:
(2025) Why People Keep Flocking to Linux in 2025 (and It's Not Just to Escape Windows)
(2025) Europe's Plan to Ditch US Tech Giants is Built on Open Source - and It's Gaining Steam
(2025) Euro Techies Call for Sovereign Fund to Escape US Dependency
(2025) Petition on EU Linux Operating System in Public Administrations
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 13, @06:05PM (3 children)
The people who you're trying to convince tend to be stuck in a model of procurement. The process goes something like this:
1. The people who have to use the tools, or their bosses, are asked to come up with a checklist of features that they want, and pass them to somebody with the authority to buy it.
2. The checklist of features turns into an RFP or something similar that gets distributed out to both the general public and the salespeople that the buyer has always worked with.
3. The salespeople fall over themselves glad-handing and promising that their stuff has satisfied 100% of the checklist features, for the low low price of €X. This part is the most fun for the buyer, because the salespeople get to use their corporate expense account to butter them up.
4. The buyer then picks one of the salespeople's bids, most likely the one that they picked before, until the next cycle.
5. The IT department and the people who have to use the tools then deal with the fact that the checklisted features only kinda sorta work as advertised.
An open-source project that has most or even all of the features that you need, combined with hiring a programmer or two to add whatever you need feature-wise and chip in on maintenance for that and the 10 other open-source things you use, doesn't fit into this process. Even if the cost is < €X, and even if instead of getting a feature matrix saying that you bought what you needed you get a programmer who builds you what you actually needed. In part because step 3 doesn't happen anymore and that's no fun, but also because the bureaucracy and mental model says that's not how things are done.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 13, @06:11PM
I've noticed that in recent decades, point #2, the writing of the checklist, is done by the vendors themselves. That is done by them either outright or else by their embedded sales teams on the payroll of the victim organization. But, yeah, the check list has been a problem since the 1990s and still is a big one. Nowadays, does it matter at all that LibreOffice or Calligra has n% fewer 'features' than MSO if those missing n% are never, ever used? For most people, Calligra or LibreOffice meet 100% of their needs. What the government can do is push to require the OpenDocument Format for official communications and just like that, M$ monopoly over office suites goes away in the same instant.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 13, @06:16PM (1 child)
You're missing the "procurement CEO" level of things.
Somebody "manages the budget" of the department, division, region, etc. And the bigger that budget is, the bigger the salary of the budget manager is. It's a not so subtle dis-incentive to save money, right up there with "use it or lose it" mandates to spend all available budget dollars by end of the fiscal year, or have the following years' budgets decreased by the amount unspent...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 13, @07:47PM
That's a very good point.
Although I assume that if an executive is trying to waste company money, there are plenty of other fun ways of doing it, e.g. sending the executive to Vegas or Dubai for a "business meeting", renovations for the executive offices, hiring a brother-in-law to do nothing in particular, etc etc. And all of those involve getting more direct personal benefit than running it through a sales drone and getting a kickback.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin