The first article in one of our national newspapers this morning about the launch of the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium ( #EDIC) today 🍾🇪🇺
Title: "Europe takes first step towards digital independence. Four European countries are taking on the American tech giants, taking the lead in developing European software." 🇳🇱🇫🇷🇩🇪🇮🇹
@Gina Amazing, I've been waiting for something like this to happen.
I looked at their website. Some pretty amazing projects they are working on over there!
@Gina Too bad they still missed the mark as they often to. The Netherlands is well known for messing up the vast majority of IT projects.
Them working on "Mijn Bureau", a whole new Office suite _in Dutch_, rather than forking & modifying and/or contributing back to existing, multi-lingual solutions such as LibreOffice, shows how they are unfortunately still not understanding that it's no longer the 1990's out there
@Gina It would be nice if #Accessibility was among important goals at #EDIC from day 1.
@Gina The thing is that all the alternative sub-products are already available for EU office automation, independent of US tech-companies. This has been achieved in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, for example. So there is no need for a bureaucratic vehicle such as DC-Edic for standard integrations that are workable for governments and EU businesses. The only thing that will accelerate digital independence is prohibiting the exclusion of these alternatives in tenders, showing leadership.
@Gina mmmm... will it be better for Europeans with spyware implemented by their own governments? It may have been better with American spyware, because then the Americans, who are physically and legally more remote, had first dibs on the data. For sure they gave it to Europe anyway, but Europe had to ask.
Now European governments will cut out this middleman and spy on its citizens using its own software, that it will sell to its citizens as "privacy-respecting" and "open-source".
Probably better to use Windows than something cooked up by European fascists. If you must use things made by fascists, use the things made by fascists further away from you.
Btw it says 4 countries, but those are the ones that have openly committed themselves to the EDIC (which is a whole bureaucratic ordeal).
We have a ton of "observing" EU member states involved, some of which are very active participants already (like Luxembourg! 👏🇱🇺)
@Gina We have big potential in this. We should sponsor development of community based OS.
But what is important is try to stabilize API (GUI, widgets and so on) to private sector have easy way to jump in. For end users they need companies to support Linux more.
