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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: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 13, @06:13PM (2 children)
What they really need is an IT staff who can:
A) setup and maintain these configurations on their machines for them
and
B) hold their hand and tell them, again, which icon to click to find that document they saved last week.
Staff costs money, and for every X headcount of users, they will need Y headcount of IT staff.
Unfortunately, every time you make a change to the official configuration, that Y becomes Y * 4 until everybody settles down and forgets they used to do it differently.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Wednesday January 14, @01:04PM (1 child)
Yeah I'd agree but consider a reproducible run-everywhere container would make life easier on whomever is running it.
The euros could take what exists for running OO or similar in a container, then euro the heck out of it I18N to the max, add the usual euro big brother is watching you support, etc.
There's probably some feather bedding going on where one dude could just do it given how far along existing projects are, but they're trying to set up a whole bureaucracy to "support" that one dude doing the actual work which sounds very EU.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 14, @01:52PM
> a reproducible run-everywhere container would make life easier on whomever is running it.
More or less, that's what Windows provides. Now, it's more complex than that of course since M$ has bullied the vendors of the world into writing their own drivers and installing and configuring them all before selling a Windows equipped PC, but... overall... there's still that somewhat plug-and-play "experience" in Windows that keeps their IT drones afraid of the alternatives.
The more that Linux maintainers can emulate that experience for their users, the better - all it takes is developer time (iow money, because developers have to eat...)
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]