The EU and honestly any other group of nations can fix the American IT hegemony problem, they can fund universally available FOSS tools that run as cloud services or locally for smaller orgs/businesses. It would not be that expensive, the work force to do it is global and very enthusiastic. Hosting is basically the same (though if you hosting was free your data was never yours) and many tools, already exist. We run infra on Next Cloud, and most of it works great (the email client is meh)
@quinn Honestly, I feel like it ultimately all comes down to "government organizations like the EU don't like seriously funding things that they don't control, and that makes it incompatible with the FOSS development model" - the money is there, the need is there, the skills are there, the motivation is there, but the avenue for power isn't
@joepie91 they already fund a lot of FOSS, though much more specialized. Basically every CERT in every country gets EU dev money, etc.
I think there's very few people in Brussels who understand FOSS.
@quinn With "serious funding", I'm more thinking "give bags of money to maintainers to keep FOSS projects running that the EU as an institution does not have an immediate interest in", rather than funding EU infrastructure that *happens* to be FOSS.
There's *some* of that, in the form of NLNet, but it's absolute peanuts compared to eg. tech startup funding schemes.
@joepie91 it's not serious money though, I think that's the bigger problem. If it was throwing 7 or 8 figures at a consulting company to build infra, they would have already done it.