Digital Minister wants open standards and open source as guiding principle
heise.de
heise.de
If there is any place where local cloud and open standards would make sense, then it seems to me the military would be it. I can't really imagine that the US would ever use another country's IT infrastructure to host sensitive information.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...
For example, an EU country won't hesitate to torpedo another country's energy, economy or industry plan if they can score political points at home for their voters or to protect their own domestic industry players from the other members. That's also one of the reasons why Switzerland and Norway refused to join the EU.
EU is like a marriage between 27 people instead of 2, always at each other's throats but never(until 2020) divorcing. This is not the ideal environment that scales tech companies. That's why there no big tech from Europe.
And having worked together with the German government on IT projects, I’ll say that the _only_ way an OSS project would be even considered is if there’s a company backing the project that has extreme amounts of passion, patience and passibility. In the end, they need some _entity_ that is _legally responsible_ - and it’s always better if that entity is not them ;)
But they didn't even do that.
The fact the Google cloud is private for the military doesn't matter. The core issue is that Germany, the richest EU country, is incapable of building its own cloud infra for its defense. It's a laughing stock to posture how the EU is getting rid of US tech when EU's biggest economy is entangling itself even deeper with the US big-tech. Andit's not just Germany.
> but they need a solution _now_
AFAIR Europe has been saying "we need X now" for over 10 years, that I'm more than fatigued by it.
Things don't magic themselves into existence out of thin air just because you need them _NOW_. You need to make smart investments and incentives into the private sector both for investors and the workforce, to get the results the US has.
The problem is EU wants the nice things the US has built, but without putting the long term effort, similar how a guy wants to have the body of Thor but doesn't go to the gym and eats french-fries all day.
> I’ll say that the _only_ way an OSS project would be even considered is if there’s a company backing the project that has extreme amounts of passion, patience and passibility.
And why wasn't a German company like SAP or T-Systems able to do it?
Getting to the level of capability and provable mandate compliance of a hyperscaler like GCP takes decades of engineering investment. Renting a chunk of air-gapped GCP infra is much cheaper and faster.
I wish there were European companies committed to this level of engineering investment. I don't know that there are.
That was a rhetorical question, of course they went with Google because it's better and faster than anything in Europe. My point is that Europe will never be able to match Google levels of hyperscalers as long as buying from Google is cheaper and faster.
China's ban on US tech was a blessing in disguise as it brewed a strong domestic industry competitive to the US even if it'll never be on par. EU tech industry is even further behind.
They want to host SAP and it seems there are just a small set of providers where it is running on.
If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow.
This really could be the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an ever-present aspect when filling in forms, tables, templates, etc.
No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.
You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits.
The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS; nor if it were spent on consulting and/or a government IT office. Trade is not a problem in itself.
The real concern is that letting Microsoft be the only game in town for business software of this type lets them control prices - that just having some trustworthy alternatives would allow the same services to be obtained for, say, 500M euro instead.
The other concern is related to tech dependence - that the government's reliance on MS services allows the US to use a threat of denying access to MS products as a strong-arming tactic in any negotiations.
Finally, the concern that a US company - and, implicitly, US security services - has access to potentially highly confidential data is a national security risk, though the impact is hard to measure.
The difference is that if you are using tariffs to stimulate local industrial capacity, this can take many years and you might have competitive disadvantages (ie wages, access to supply chains, etc.). If you are replacing software like Windows and Office with open source alternatives and you put the money from the licenses into your local tech sector to develop a support ecosystem, I think this is both achievable and would make your country richer too.
If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet.
If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would.
So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
We're in recession, there are way too many fresh IT grads, and even experienced devs are having it hard in this job market. Ultimately this affects every area of our economy, as unemployed people aren't buying houses or spending much on services. Shifting some spending from MS licenses to developing local solutions would almost certainly have a positive impact on our whole economy, even if the solutions weren't any cheaper in the end.
It should be also noted that we have a state-funded education system. It seems incredibly dumb to use lots of public money to train programmers, and then have them sit unemployed, while using more public money to buy mediocre software written by other programmers beyond European Union.
It doesn't have to. Thinking you want to spend locally and building options isn't a problem - you can just invest in local capacity to deliver, build it and they will come. Artificially putting barriers (tariffs, threats) so people have to spend locally is the problem. Don't confuse these 2 just because they achieve the same and people spend more at home and less elsewhere.
> if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS
Even if you end up paying the same, 1bn Euro spent locally goes a lot further than 1bn Euro spent across the ocean.
Why do you believe this is so?
It's important to remember that many of the dominant enterprise software companies aren't there as the result of a secret conspiracy - it's because they're very good at listening to what their customers want and delivering it.
Saying "we want this open" sounds nice, but the sticker shock of paying for development, maintenance, and hosting is the tip of the iceberg. The real problems and expenses are in support and training.
Companies like Microsoft excel here - they have dedicated support teams to escalate to empowered to understand the problems of large customers and get them fixed. Paying an engineer to investigate why your USB badge reader doesn't work on Linux on Lenovo laptops on Thursdays is more expensive than a significant number of Windows licenses.
Your comment could be pulled directly from Slashdot back when the German Government decided to try SUSE.
Europe is not in a strong position in hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel) and that would take a long time to get closer.
But it’s fundamentally because the EU has until recently had a very cooperative relationship with the US.
- How do you create a competitor to US companies. You can not expect industry or even governments to switch to a worse alternative, which requires more personal, causes more issue and causes more costs. How do you develop such a competitor, where will it come from?
- How do you ensure that these open standards are good. As of right now basically all funding was distributed to small projects, who created their own niche software for some use case. Microsoft or Google are so valuable because they offer everything together creating a cohesive structure and not just a wide array of thrown together software.
- Where are the people to create this? A simple comparison of US and German SW dev salaries will tell you how much more valued SW Developers are in the US. Where do the Legions of people to make a project like this happen come from? Where would they even go? Microsoft and Google are great places to work at, but such places do not exist in Germany.
I wonder where they will land. Since this is a CDU minister coming from a corporation, I would have instinctively have expected him to side with big business and go with the Microsoft stack.
Both that he wasn’t a part of the CDU before joining the government and that he seems to understand the principle of digital sovereignty is a very positive sign to me.
Because of this I am certain that they are evaluating OpenDesk (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) by the German center for digital sovereignty (https://www.zendis.de/), which tries combines Collabora Online, OpenXChange, Matrix, XWiki and some smaller tools into a cohesive suite.
Them ending up choosing it would be a natural fit sovereignty wise and not unprecedented - the military‘s BWMessenger is already basically a version of Element.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. Being a former CEO, the man will understand how the efficiency and reliability of the IT infrastructure will affect his organization‘s productivity - and I fear those products are definitely behind the top of the line commercial solutions in that regard. That said, Microsoft also keeps fumbling with its products and ministry workers are likely already used to sub optimal processes, so maybe in the name of sovereignty it will be worth it.
China and Russia also made performative efforts to "ditch MSFT". All walked back on their efforts (probably when they got a better deal).
It is clear that with digital money the sole way to make people trust them is being open and it's clear that those who reign in moneyland do not want to loose their comfy position.
It's only Trump's America First policies that is pushing EU to react very late.
And yes, now that America are showing their true colors with Trump leading the way, finally, finally we are starting to see that maybe this isn't how we should want things to be. It's still going to take a long time for Europe to shake off its dependence on the US tech industry and truly start to challenge it, but hopefully this is a wake-up call that will gradually push things in the right direction.
They can not even get intra European "talent" to do these jobs. Germany is notorious for its low level of digitalization and it's staggering lack in Software competency.
I think in general it's also the case that in Europe and the UK, technology has been a very upwardly mobile career path with many people who end up with good incomes but no familial network to fall back on and not accumulating any personal wealth or stability until they're already considering retirement.
This basically means technologists in Europe are not empowered to be entrepreneurial as bootstrapping is impractical around full time work and the investment often isn't out there.
Aversion to risk. No european company, bureaucracy, government is as bold and risk-taking as those over the pond. Only when something has been proven, stamped, certified and established, will it be used. So new and small OSS projects, startups, and generally new ways of doing things will have a far harder time overall.
There is even the tendency to spend tons of public money on stuff like GAIA-X to establish European cloud infrastructure. And then never using it because all that new-fangled stuff where one would be the first user cannot ever be good and viable. Thereby forgetting that money has already been paid to make it exactly like the European governments wanted it to be, and that any service needs its first users to grow over the teething problems...
dismissing the legitimate use of computers in education as "bringing TikTok into the classroom," is incredibly bullshit way to respond to OP
We initially introduced that kind of thing in Sweden, but it turns out that introducing these things is correlated with worse test results, so there's actually debate about possibly going away from them, despite the convenience for teachers.
What kind of CV would you expect for you to say he knows what he's talking about?
Because I'm honestly having a hard time thinking of something. Maybe being exec/CTO at a FAANG? (but then that'd make him appear biased).
What I don't see is any connection to Open Source specifically. It's not like he was a manager at SuSE in his early career, for example.
He's not your typical politician (lawyer or otherwise non technical background, no corporate experience). He actually did a Ph. D. in physics and worked as a management consultant at BCG, and ran a few companies. Pretty impressive profile for such a role as far as I can see.
We had some encounter with German bureaucracy in our company that is proper face palm material.
We're basically being asked to tell the Rentenversicherung (the state pension fund) a lot of stuff they should already know. We're expected to dig out a lot of stuff from our HR records and send it to them by means of some tedious form. By Fax! We'd laugh about it except we are too busy doing all this bullshit work for them because they can't figure out how to operate in this millennium. We have to dig out records for employees that are long gone, go over their monthly statements, etc.
How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. And yet they pay some poor soul to take stacks of paper from a fax machine and enter it into god knows what kind of filing system they have to "update their records". Absolutely appallingly stupid.
We're also supposed to sign that fax with our company stamp. This is an actual thing in Germany. At least it used to be. It's no longer actually required to have one. But obviously the German bureaucracy is full of dark little corners that haven't updated their processes since the cold war era when faxes were a new thing.
I'd recommend a chainsaw approach but considering how Doge escalated in the US, maybe appointing somebody with a clue is maybe the better move. It's not a bad start. But clearly, something drastic needs to happen. Something more than vague intentions and some IT agency is going to chin stroke over this for a few years. Which is the usual German thing. Lot's of waffle, not a lot of action. And it's probably going to take a decade.
My recommendation: disconnect all Fax machines. Anyone caught operating one should be forcefully retired/fired immediately. Make no exceptions. Monitor the telephone network for rogue fax usage and eliminate anything and everything still depending on that nonsense. And then tackle company stamps, civil servants copying information manually from paper into a terminal, etc.
Usually the answer is "German data privacy laws that forbid sharing that information with another entity of the same government". If it’s not that, then the fallback is "Federation".
Some processes can by now be done via some web form, but often with braindead implementations, and still the necessity to print, sign and send a distilled version of your filing. And there is absolutely no common standard, no common auth, no centralized processes even within the same office, so total chaos and madness.
The only saving grace is that by now it has gotten easier to get snail mail stamps as numerical codes or matrix codes to embed in printouts...