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I don't disagree. The EU needs to commit to running FOSS Desktop OSes. But I am concerned a "OS for the EU" Initiative will end up like all EU IT projects, that being smothered by red tape and (political) comitee stewardship.

I think the EU Public sector has too much variance in it to be safely serviced by just one distro. Just thinking on the hifdes of legacy infrastructure that needs to be kept integrated (storage, auth, etc).

I think a better approach would be to have a programme in the EU to allow local administration and PS agencies to establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards would go a long way. Couple that with an incentive to utilize small shops for the execution instead of corporations and we might have a chance to emerge from the bug pile of mud that is current Public Sector IT before anybody else in the world.

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> But I am concerned a "OS for the EU" Initiative will end up like all EU IT projects, that being smothered by red tape and (political) comitee stewardship.

No need to worry then, this is not a EU IT project at all, just some Internet rando using a misleading name for their pet project.

> just some Internet rando using a misleading name for their pet project.

Thank god someone said it, there are actually so many of these strange projects that try to promote some improvement for 'their' problems and propose them as required by the EU to adopt, without understanding the complexity that's actually involved in how the EU works. Another example I'm reminded of was last week someone shared their proposal for a unified API to access particular medical data, notably the API was suiting only their needs.

But what bothers me the most is the huburis in assuming they know better and so continue to insult the EU's current systems.

Of course things can be improved, but it's not some start up that you can just break things for 80% of your customers who can't migrate to the next API version.

this is what your looking for then

> https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/interoperable-euro...

and this too

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Fram...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Fram...

quote

Draft Version 2 of the EIF[2] was the subject of a political debate, where the main technology/commercial issues relate to the role of lobbying for proprietary software.[4]

EIF 2 was adopted by the European Commission as the Annex II - EIF (European Interoperability Framework) of the Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services” on 16 December 2010.[5]

> I think the EU Public sector has too much variance in it to be safely serviced by just one distro.

I think that's THE problem. Every member country has at least one duplicate of some public sector thing (tax agency, property/citizen registry, health registry etc.) and each of them does their thing slightly differently.

> I think a better approach would be to <...> allow local administration <...> establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards <...>.

Part of the problem are data schemas. Even if you mandate some common information exchange format, it is either somewhat opinionated on data schemas anyway or so generic that you need combinatorial explosion of custom middleware to align schemas. You just kick the can of pain down the road and eventually have a bunch of agencies that are in theory connected but cannot exchange data without "a project" anyway.

While slower and more painful to initially deploy, a much more fitting solution would be to have common open core software, enforcing common schemas, but allowing custom extensions/middleware.

> I think that's THE problem. Every member country has at least one duplicate of some public sector thing (tax agency, property/citizen registry, health registry etc.) and each of them does their thing slightly differently.

You say this as if it is a bad thing, this is part and parcel of how the EU works. It's not the same as a Federal system where there is one way and the rest are derivatives of it. There is more autonomy for each of the EU member states to do things how they want.

> It's not the same as a Federal system where there is one way and the rest are derivatives of it.

The general framework is still based on the same core principles and regulations, therefore cores most of the systems are much more alike than different. The differences come in additional details, where data models can be extended from common core and local workflows and local integrations, where custom development is required anyway. If those custom developments are built on top of common open core, the know-how translates laterally across whole EU and expertise can at the very least be shared.

> The general framework is still based on the same core principles and regulations, therefore cores most of the systems are much more alike than different.

No not really, I can say from an IE point of view, the reason the border at northern Ireland was such an issue for Brexit was because the good Friday agreement was because this was done outside of the EU. If the EU had the same authority as the Federal in the US as an example, there would be a hard border.

General framework yes, for regulations, but how you run your government, absolutely is up to you. Just look to Ordaban in Hungary. Not exactly playing well with the EU, doesn't mean the EU can force him to do something.

Edit : Again there are nuances with the EU. And there are issues, but overall it works really well.

- Was going to correct Orban's name but he's worth less the effort than typing this.

Okay, it seems there is misunderstanding.

What I meant that having multiple, slightly incompatible reimplementations of essentially the same base software is the biggest technical problem for common data access.

> But I am concerned a "OS for the EU" Initiative will end up like all EU IT projects, that being smothered by red tape and (political) comitee stewardship.

"All"? DNS4EU (https://www.joindns4.eu) seems to be progressing reasonably well.

> seems to be progressing reasonably well.

By what metric would that be? Not doubting it but I've heard about it first a few days ago.

The folks involved in the project have been pretty open about their project plans/timelines, speaking about it in webinars and various conferences, and have largely followed what they claimed. Making it available to the public undoubtedly could've been faster, but sometimes "move fast, break things" isn't ideal... (particularly for infrastructure that folks want to depend upon).

> speaking about it in webinars and various conferences

That's unfortunately the feeling I got from the landing page, lots of talking, bureaucracy and buzzword bingo and not much "doing".

I might be wrong. For comparison https://letsencrypt.org, not a single mention of "webinars" or "stakeholders".

That's what it looks like to me as well. I klocked through the home page on mobile, feels like 25 pages of "why this is a good thing" and a bit of self congratulatory acknowledgement but I didn't get any hint on how to participate, use it or where to see the code.

How can they claim to be "4 EU" while having their entire website hosted on Hubspot, a US-based company?

Having an os that could run to substitute much of the "regular" desktops used by public sectors in eu would be quite nice, without going as far as substituting old servers with windows 2012

From what I can remember from the "Munich Linux" days, the biggest two hurdles where that 1. all processes had proprietary data formats (Office, exchange and some Adobe stuff) as a de facto standard and it was hard fo move suppliers to open ones and 2. That even mundane Public Sector PCs needed to interface with weird/old/arcane storage or authentication protocols.

So while on the surface that Desktop is something that should work with oob Linux parts it ends up being much more involved once you try it.

This is what I was thinking. I wonder if the advent web based Office changes that equation. I imagine besides excel and word, there are a lot of access based apps as well.

> the biggest two hurdles

The first one was Gates' visit to Munich. Corruption works wonders.

this comment on "why LiMux kinda failed" was pretty interesting to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930203

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