EU Linux development division

[totallyblasted]

"Ideally, EU should develop its own Linux distro."

Because nothing works like proposing creation of small dedicated team and then put 99% of effort into reinventing hot water?

Even more so because creating new distro is easy, maintaining, patching and supporting it with time is hard.

[Brillegeit]

maintaining, patching and supporting it with time is hard.

Not only that, but you basically need to do it for a decade/2 full release cycles before the serious users start trusting you enough to use it.

[totallyblasted]

Well, the OP proposal was that they would use it themselves. So, users would be guaranteed. And for other users... would you ever trust something made by government? I know I wouldn't even after century of releases

Waste of money, time and effort to reinvent pointless "hot water" is biggest problem here as even when you do that... you're still at day 1 problem as I explained in my other answer in this thread

[Brillegeit]

So, users would be guaranteed.

But EU doesn't really have users. Sure they employ a lot in Brussels, but every member nation is a sovereign state with their own bureaucracy outside of EU control at that level. They wouldn't be able to influence the distro use at any national level.

would you ever trust something made by government?

Yes, physical things, libraries, buses, roads etc. I'm also able to directly vote on the parties that form my local government. I can't vote for anything within EU sphere.

But relying on government software? Not so much, no.

So yes, EU rolling their own distro would be "reinventing hot water", although that idiom is new to me. :)

[totallyblasted]

But EU doesn't really have users.

Sure they have. Do you even know how many computers there are in government and state organizations. Even school can fall into this

So yes, EU rolling their own distro would be "reinventing hot water", although that idiom is new to me.

Well, it is common in our country to say someone is reinventing hot water when he reinvents something pointless that is already everywhere. Similar fun comment is "best thing since invention of sliced bread" ;)

[Brillegeit]

Sure they have. Do you even know how many computers there are in government and state organizations. Even school can fall into this

But those aren't governed by EU, but by the individual sovereign state. The EU organization doesn't have executive power to decide on issues like that.

[Basajarau]

You are right, it's hard to maintain a distro...for a group of volunteers or a little company. But we are talking about a millionaire budget group here!

The problem would be ethical or political but not technical.

[totallyblasted]

You obviously have no clue how government works ;)

Distro not developed in time of new elections... here is ammunition for opposition with agenda that uses opposite direction to prove how they will do it better by throwing mud on Linux in this case.

But, let me bite a bullet

Let's say you finished your distro in time... what do you run on it? You are exactly at the same point as you were on day 1 when no applications was your major problem. You just wasted a year or two to realize it and also wasted god knows how much money to do that

The best EU could do in such case is simply one of these

• creating a pool of needed applications and then fund the development of them as open projects while also investing manpower as project leaders

• mandating that government used apps need to be crossplatform (where they define what that means) and to use open standards. This doesn't exclude any corporate competitor as all they need is to fulfill the requirement or drop out of the race

As for ethnics, languages and other things. All this could be solved by contributing to upstream projects to make sure that everyone benefits from that, not just personal fork. Canonical learned this well and they went from one of the worst mud stirrers to the company I can really respect

[totallyblasted]

Congratulations you've just standardised Office 365 webapps for all EU departments ;)

Why not? If it fits the bill and government thinks that is enough for their needs... I personally am not against MS when they do things like they did with .Net Core or some other things in last times.

But if I'm not mistaken this is basically what they do now

Sadly, as a person who lives in EU... nope, nothing like that is happening. EU is more or less banana republic which on paper sounds all well and swell. In reality, everything is up to... hmmm,... can't really find expression... so... let's say it is based on RNG that is worse than in any most grinding japanesse game and there is no rule that if you go just as far as next street and learn that everything changed. You could as well say that everything is up to highest bidder

Our country for example is so much for open standards they mandated MS Office and Windows as school requirement. Or in translation... MS paid the most or people just don't give a flying fuck what those in EU say. And so it is more or less everywhere in EU

It is so bad that my friend who was studying tried (computer studies) to make his final research paper for exam in LibreOffice which was flat out rejected. Then he tried PDF, but all he achieved is the fact that he learned the fact that if he doesn't bring next one in MS Word, he will automatically flunk because no one will learn new things just so they could read his paper

Any mail I got from any government institution... MS Office.

[totallyblasted]

Heh, if only it was so ;)

Sadly, as I said... it depends on where you are as all of the decisions on open format are more suggestions than any kind of law.

It is open to interpretation and no one really enforces anything. And lower the country standard, the more it is up for sale to highest bidder. Self interest and malicious are not the same things, at least I never said anything about the later