Mastodon works fairly well for that I think.

It's not only HN. You can see big tech media hate against any effort europe does. Everybody is mocking europe for building 10 years old chip fabs or their measly small unusable clouds or bad startup scene.

It's interesting because not that long ago nobody cared about what europe did in tech. Or more like everybody was fine with the fact that europe imported computers and exported something else. It was like that forever. I am not sure where this is coming from. It almost seems like even these weak efforts might mess up with somebodys business.

> Of course there's a lot to criticize and also to appreciate about the EU. But this is supposed to be a forum for intelligent, thoughtful discussion and yet as soon as the EU gets mentioned it basically turns into reddit.

You dislike criticism? I find criticism an important part of discourse and discussion. HN is very clearly not anything like reddit - just the insane amount of censorship on reddit alone, is already one argument against that claim. Many more could be given. I have been using reddit in the past for many years, so I know how reddit changed. Not that everything is perfect on hackernews; I dislike the "you are posting too much" limitation, for instance. But we don't have over-eager censor-mods here whereas that was locking down numerous interesting discussions on reddit.

With regards to the EU situation: the EU is in a very strange situation. On the one hand it is doing good things; this then gets cancelled by the EU commission acting as a pure lobbyist group, as well as a huge army of bureaucrats who want more and more money and dream about assimilating more and more countries, which makes zero sense. Whether the EU will succeed with regards to their open source strategy or not, who knows. What I do know is that individual countries, such as France or the Netherlands, are quite intelligent when it comes to good decisions (Germany is absolutely undermined by lobbyists, so it is totally paralysed here); I am not convinced the EU is in a similar situation. It would have to be reformed, but people in Brussels don't want to see their job axxed away, so nothing will improve here.

My recommendation is that if you are unhappy, go and talk about it - but don't expect others to turn to your assumptions about how a discussion should happen when it comes to the EU, because they may not share your opinion here.

The only good thing EU ever did in the last 25 years was GDPR in 2016. It has been slowly eroding everything else.

Although I usually come up negative on my The Year of Linux Desktop comments, that would already be a starting point.

Unless EU citzens are able to easily walk into FNAC, Vobis, Cool Blue, MediaMarket, Carrefour, Publico,.... and come out with a laptop or desktop with e.g. SuSE Linux already set up, this will always be a niche thing from nerds assembling their own PCs, or finding their ways into Tuxedo and co.

And there needs to be some kind of value in actually doing that for normal people, otherwise it will be just like netbooks, most people will return them and ask for a Windows PC, after being "tricked" into getting one of those Linux PCs.

There is definitely a lot of this happening, e.g. this is a 'collaboration suite for civil servants' that's basically a collection of existing open source projects

https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra/

They show all the components they use here https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/docs/category/com... and have set up guides for departments to operate it all on Kubernetes

I'm guessing from my own use of NextCloud, Matrix etc that this will simply be deemed not good enough compared to Google Workspace or Microsoft WhateverItsCalledNow as these things are pretty rough around the edges in my experience, but this looks like a good step in the right direction to me

There is money but it's all vague and hard to get and usually with tax breaks instead of just money. I would opensource everything we built, but I have to eat something so it'll be when I die and/or the company is sold and/or we earned enough to make everyone eat during their life (with some reasonable amounts that assume hyper inflation won't happen) (it is contractually arranged). Many EU gov institutions use our software and would LOVE for us to open source it - they would immediately stop paying.

Virtue signaling

> Like that, a few companies are specialized in sucking public funds and delivering nothing. Or just the minimum to say that they did something.

Agreed. Fraunhofer institute in Germany is a prime example.

The pattern is not broken, it works as designed. This is mostly a money-pump from government(s) to private interests, mostly sitting in large IT houses.

> Like that, a few companies are specialized in sucking public funds and delivering nothing.

Not just public, private funds as well. Typical EU, I call that helicopter regulating: you see a problem, throw a regulation at it, then close you eyes.

GDPR pop-ups are the most obvious example, but there are so many more.

For instance, now apparently companies can opt to send payslips digitally instead of physically (paper). Of course, some smart ass nitpicked that employees could loose or change their mail address, so the company is now forced to store digitally delivered payslips in some kind of European-hosted vault for 10 years. And since no sane company want to be liable for that, we now have a wonderful ecosystem of trash "payslip digital vaults" startups, which companies use to proxy-send employee payslips.

So in essence, my company is now sending my payslips (with name, address, contact details, compensation breakdown, etc) to a stupid start-up with egregious ToS, just because "send it by mail and let the employee back it up" was too simple. Thanks !!!

Is it?