I agree with this wholeheartedly.

[sesivany@social.vivaldi.net]

RE: https://mamot.fr/@ploum/115938794778974968

I agree with this wholeheartedly. We shouldn't create European versions of Google, Amazon or Microsoft, oligopols that benefit from vendor lock-in. Instead, we should have a commons based on open-source technology and standards, which can then be used to develop solutions for customers. And let the competition flourish. In my opinion, that is in our European DNA.

[jzb@hachyderm.io]

@sesivany I'm (sadly...) not European so I've kind of kept quiet about the EU's request for input on open source recently, but...

<soapbox>
ISTM that most of the suggestions are along the lines of "pay maintainers" -- which is not terrible, but also not the answer.

I hope someday that corporations and governments stop trying to fit FOSS into the vendor/supplier box and start understanding that it works best when they participate.

Don't ask maintainers to jump through vendor hoops and live contract-to-contract* to sustain a handful of identified projects: start staffing up FOSS developer departments and paying them to participate in FOSS development.

Participate in the community instead of considering it a separate thing. This has historically been one of Red Hat's superpowers: rolling up sleeves and getting directly involved in communities it depends on. Sometimes that means hiring existing maintainers, but often it means saying "hey, you three -- go get involved in XYZ project and see how we can solve the problems our customers have."

In short: stop trying to treat this as a problem that can or should be solved by capitalism. Treat it as a social good that is part of the role of government.
</soapbox>

[catweazle@social.vivaldi.net]

@sesivany, there exist and also capability of digital sovereighn in the EU. It's not the lack of capability but the lack of political will-

https://european-alternatives.eu

[bexelbie@toot.io]

@jzb @sesivany I agree with what you said. And I believe that most of the calls to “pay maintainers” are likely coming from people who would like to be paid to maintain and not paid to do a company’s work in an upstream. That’s fair.

We need to scream the quiet part out loud. Until our businesses and governments can safely do things that are hard to connect to the bottom line metric, staffing a team to do work in an upstream is difficult.

[ton@m.tzyl.eu]

@sesivany indeed. The problem with hyperscalers is both the hyper and the scale.

[jzb@hachyderm.io]

@bexelbie From those people, but also from folks who just really can't grasp a relationship between an organization and what it uses that doesn't look like procurement.

The FOSS model is too open, chaotic, communal, and consensus-based for a lot of organizational thinking. But it's not FOSS that needs to change, it's the organizational thinking...
@sesivany