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This is EU, what else do you expect? European officials saying they're ditching Windows has become a ritual:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/german-open-source-expe...:

> The German Foreign Office first moved over to Linux as a server platform in 2001... the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution.

https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...:

> By December 2013, the city concluded the migration, with over 14,800 desktops running on LiMux... In November 2017, nearly four years after the conclusion of the migration, the Munich city council adopted a decision overhauling the move. All equipment was to be refitted with Windows 10 counterparts by 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux:

> WIENUX[2] is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed by the City of Vienna in Austria... until 2008 when the download page was taken offline.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST...:

> Birmingham City Council piloted OSS on hundreds of desktops in its public libraries in 2005-6. It originally planned to install Linux ... but this was over-ambitious for the time frame of the project and compatibility problems meant that the open source OpenOffice (office suite) and Firefox (web browser) were eventually run on Windows XP

What about https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix, though?

You could be more pointed than that. French secret service "leveraging" Palantir is a disgrace , we all know who is leveraging who and its a plain shame.

It shouldn't make you sad, it should make you curious.

Broadly, I've observed that there's way way way too little discussion of the extent to which money and power, somewhat behind the scenes, can be thrown at what feels like "tech decisions."

A while back, here in Florida, a state representative had a relative who was kind of into open source and had it explained to him. Representative was like "oh interesting idea, Florida should look into doing more of this"

And the suits from Microsoft came down swiftly to "correct" matters.

It is always easy to make big announcements but harder to follow through.

They'd need a strong software and tech industry and ecosystem but in general business and economic policy, especially in France, is as hostile as possible and harder to change politically.

Performative anti-Americanism has become one of the major features of European culture (and especially French culture).

Also GendBuntu, a custom version of Ubuntu used by 100 000 stations (almost all) of the national gendarmerie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

"As a French" ne veut rien dire en anglais. Il faut rajouter man, person ou quelquechose. Frenchman, French person, French citizen.

> Munich tried a big-bang migration without enough internal expertise and caved under political pressure

Almost sounds planned to fail...

Exactly. I have been thinking about using this migration articles as a way to convince my customers to switch.

Microsoft is a strategic risk for everybody, looking at their track records the last few years.. I don't love Linux, but I like it. It's no-bullshit. It doesn't always do everything perfectly, but it has the right mindset. It doesn't want to screw me over.

I wouldn't say that. I think it's a proportional response to US tarriffs/changes in foreign policy under the current administration, just like the cancellation of defence contracts/orders.

It's unrealistic for any nation to do everything themselves, but they can make some changes in response to the US starting trade wars, ditching foreign policy/climate objectives, etc...

You always have to start somewhere. Whether this will succeed or not is not known, but you do have to start somewhere.

The US or Trump can’t switch off your chips or your networking equipment on a whim - and if they ever designed hardware that could do that, no one would buy such hardware as soon as that capability became known. Using cloud software is a much bigger risk - your access can be turned off anytime and data access is part of the deal.

Sovereignty is not about building everything yourself. Division of labor advances civilization, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of sovereignty. Sovereignty is about designing the work contract such that you don’t become entirely beholden to another party. You build hardware for me, but after that it’s mine, not yours. I trust you to build the hardware to fulfill that contract, and if you ever break that trust I’ll find someone else to build that hardware. That’s sovereignty. I don’t have to build everything myself.

Maybe, but chips cannot hold you hostage during work. I don't care where things are built (except when they are built somewhere where human rights are being treated like shit), software is what locks you into whatever bullshit the company decides on, not chips. So it is a good step I think. We don't have to be all "we don't use anything from outside the EU" - why? Some countries are better than others at stuff. Fair enough. The movement is about moving away from software monopolies that decide on what you can and can't do, not about having everything inside a certain geographical location.

Is there any evidence that GenAI is incapable of redteam'ing proprietary software? This seems like the sort of thing an agent with suitable tooling would be quite good at - I see someone already made an MCP for ghidra...

That's also a benefit to some degree. Closed source likely has as many vulnerabilities and bugs, but if AI can't find them it'll progressively become less secure.

Fair. But also I look at it as a chance. We get to fix lots of bugs. Bugs that bad actors can't use anymore.

A million eyes makes no difference when it comes to AI, they're all going to find the same vulnerabilities. Which means that one guy running AI against your closed source software is just about the same as 1000 guys running AI against your FOSS, but most of the people running against your FOSS are going to be doing it to help you, and the people who ran against your closed codebase are never going to tell you about it.

AI finding vulnerabilities and cleaning them up is going to be a budget problem for closed-source software, who have gotten used to ignoring vulnerabilities until somebody screams at them.

Closed source software isn't kept in a magical safe in a cavern deep beneath the earth, guarded by dragons. Half the people in your company touch it every day, and probably plenty of contractors.

France hasn't taken the lead. They haven't done anything. This will be abandoned by this time next year.

still growing, you mean. France is, however significant, just one country. and then there is broader push to FOSS inside Europe, as well as Europe's own sovereign solutions. some attempts were failed, some were successful, but everything is still in progress

EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions

They have a committee to decide whether to plan to grow one. Maybe once they're done funding the war in Ukraine, they'll make a decision.

Less so against China or Iran, presumably Europe will find itself on the "right side of history" yet again soon enough

Europe as a whole doesn't have or not have a spine.. it'a a huge, complicated accumulation of interests with an insane bureaucratic apparatus behind it.

I think you're right. Even though France might not have done much yet, it's a sign many people will read about and maybe think Linux is a good alternative. That's a win in my book.

AI and cloud are another thing altogether. Mistral is alright, open-source AI models are alright, but overall I think they can't compete yet. And I don't think there are fully capable cloud alternatives to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud yet. EU pushing Nextcloud-based alternatives really doesn't fuel confidence honestly. I mean Nextcloud is fine, but that's not the big alternative push we need here.

France has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?

It sounds actually nutts that governments are allowed to run unknown and uncheckable binaries as their(our?) infrastructure.

Why wouldnt linux and FOSS benefit from usage? At the least it result in social validation, if not bug reports

> I fear this might be just license costs cutting and not something that Linux and FOSS will benefit from.

yup, at this point, nothing but cobwebs and IOU's left in the coffers over there and every little bit of saving helps.

Linus Torvalds created Linux as a student in Helsinki, Finnland. He later took U.S. citizenship and lives in Portland, Oregon, TTBOMK.

Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.

The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.

It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.

The “main guy” is Finnish. He also got American citizenship recently, but given the US has increased attacks on naturalised citizens [0] and has a history of this [1] it’s not a solid foundation.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

Just Wiki Linus Torvalds my friend:

> Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland

> In 2004, Torvalds moved with his family from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon.

?

No, and no?

...what?

Yeah, he became American, just like Einstein, Fermi, Von Neumann, etc.

There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.

> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

It's perfectly possible for people to be passionate about the subject.

> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

Nah, linux and "$curreant_year is the year of the linux desktop" is just something the hacker / maker / nerd scene is passionate about.

I remember similar articles being posted 20+ years ago on Slashdot. And as we’ve seen, it’s often less of a “use Linux” and more of a “we have an alternate vendor” and there’s often suspicious lock-in (see the case in the EU or some similar country where the vendor was reading emails).

The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.

Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.

But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.

Not all AI uses LLM, and for some common LLM applications like summarization and translation you can already use CPU only models. The government, or even your average employer, is not going to need a lot of AI video generation or other really GPU intensive tasks. Prompt processing is currently more GPU oriented, but I don't see it as an impossible challenge given, say, 10-15 years.

Also, CPU-only doesn't necessarily mean "on your own computer". You can easily have 100 TB RAM in a couple of racks.

Do you people have to squeeze a comment about AI into every post?

I think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).

No-one needs LLMs.

AI has no value.