by phkamp | 2026-01-09 13:23:58+00:00
Here is what I submitted:

I am a well known FOSS developer.

At one point code I had written protected half the passwords on the entire Internet, and today around a quarter of all HTTP(S) traffic on the internet goes through software I have written ("Varnish").

That, and the fata morgana of retirement shimmering on my horizon, makes it my considered opinion that FOSS is the gift EU does not deserve, and runs a great risk of destroying on first contact.

However, closed source as we know it, is not compatible with an open, free and fair society, so I am more than aboard with the EU's long overdue recognition of FOSS as the way forward and out of the grubby, greedy claws of "Big Tech" and their endless enshitification of our lives.

The kind of FOSS software relevant to this discussion is usually rock steady and dependable in ways much commercial closed software, precisely because of the secrecy, can never be or become.

But the human communities which produces the FOSS software are fragile, fractious, and as a general rule, composed of people who may be great programmers, but who have absolutely no experience, and no interest, in fostering and stewarding stable human communities.

This is literally why there are who knows how many, different "distributions" of the Linux operating system, "window managers", "web-site frameworks" and programming languages.

Therefore the absolutely most important thing for EU to understand about FOSS, is that it probably is as close to the "ideal market", in the sense of economic theories, as anything will ever come: It literally costs nothing to become a competitor.

But that also means that if the EU member countries were to pick, no matter how fair and competently, a set of FOSS software to standardize on, and pour money into the people behind it, to provide the necessary resources to support and sustain the need for IT systems, for all the administrations in the EU countries, that software would instantly stop being FOSS - no matter what words the license might contain, because it would no longer be part of the market.

In other words: EU cannot "switch to FOSS", it would no longer be FOSS if EU did.

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.

To everybody, me included, option two seems the ideologically "pure" choice, because we have all been brought to believe that "governments should not pick winners".

But governments have always picked winners. Today all of EU has 230VAC electrical grids, because EU picked that as a winner, thereby leveling the market to everybody's benefit.

Therefore I will argue, that the wise choice for EU is option three.

First, it will be incredibly cheap, as in just tens of millions of Euro per year, to provide all EU citizens with a free and trustworthy software platform to run on their computers.

Second, it can be done incredibly fast: From EU makes the decision, the first version can be release in a matter of months, if not weeks.

Third, it will guarantee interoperability of data.

Sincerely,

Poul-Henning Kamp