Europe really does seem to be leading the way with open source gov tech.
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.
The top six contributors to Open Source globally are American Companies. In the top 10 there are no European companies, 9 are American and 1 is Chinese. https://opensourceindex.io/
I think the principles behind this are very good, nevertheless the ideas here have been around for a long time and the EU and Germany have funded that direction for quite a while. The questions which haven't been answered are:
- 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.
> When asked whether the emerging Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization had already set up a "signal group" for messaging exchange, the head of department replied that the ministry was still "on a wild goose chase" following the US TeleMessage affair. It was still sounding out which infrastructure would be best for this.
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.
We remember Munich. We cheered. We saw nothing coming out of it.
China and Russia also made performative efforts to "ditch MSFT". All walked back on their efforts (probably when they got a better deal).
Do see NGI Taler (GNU Taler by EU/ECB) and Tourbillon project vs the recent https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to...
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 shocking that European countries, whose populations have high digital literacy, who have many leading universities, and can attract talent globally to move to europe has failed to challenge US dominance in tech.
It's only Trump's America First policies that is pushing EU to react very late.
Germany is not the poster cild when it comes to digitalisation. Schools do not have tablets, public health uses fax, areas with poor Internet speed...
"Open standards & open source" is such a blast from the past. Namely 2010s Pirate Parties.
Does he know what he is talking about?
No money mentioned? Empty talk.
Two weeks ago the same website (heise.de) reported that the german military will use Google cloud services [1].
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...