What I do not understand is why not to work with the openSUSE community, or fork from them. But instead use a USA based distro like Fedora.
openSUSE has all their tooling based in EU ground. For example, OBS that is the build service, has the machines around Germany or Prague. A big bulk of the community is EU based, (with very relevant contributors from many other places), and SUSE, the company that is helping (via infra and some packages) is from Germany.
I do not known if sovereignty makes sense in the open source world, as at the end is a joint effort of multiple developers from many (and some times confronted) places, but if it does make sense then I would value more those other criteria.
Especially weird since the dude behind it is professionally situated in data protection policy work.
Going with effing IBM is a really weird thing to do for his "Proof-of-Concept". Debian for its robustness or openSUSE for being distinctly european would have been much more inspiring.
I agree. I use both and have a slight preference towards Fedora these days, but nevertheless I believe that the foundation for the EU OS should be a European distro. Practically there is very little difference between OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora.
As of February 2025, the Board has the following members:
Dr. Gerald Pfeifer (Austria), Chair
Ish Sookun (Mauritius)
Jeff Mahoney (United States)
Rachel Schrader (United States)
Shawn W Dunn (United States)
Simon Lees (Australia
And there's no clear value-add here. I am particularly adamant that Linux needs to move towards reproducibility yesterday, since the ability to inject spyware in Linux is first and foremost a process risk.
That is a key area too. I know that most of the distros are working in that direction[1], and in the case of Fedora, openSUSE or Debian they are reaching high level of reproducibility.
Those distributions are making huge efforts in keeping a core that is 100% reproducible, working upstream to fix issues, and providing reporting and tests tools to detect regressions (for example [2])
Not a fan. When I tried it a few years ago, I acquired significant painful scar tissue. It was very Windows-centric, and Linux support was an afterthought. It was more arcane than Active Directory.
After I left Univention behind, I migrated to JumpCloud. It has its faults. Linux support is also secondary to Windows support, but for me, it was several orders of magnitude easier to work with than Univention or Active Directory.
I miss NIS. It made many aspects of managing a collection of Linux machines much easier than anything to date. I hope that the future EU project does not adopt Univention, or anything like Active Directory. Instead, look to where NIS was successful, where JumpCloud is successful, and come up with a better solution overall.
I don't disagree. The EU needs to commit to running FOSS Desktop OSes. But I am concerned a "OS for the EU" Initiative will end up like all EU IT projects, that being smothered by red tape and (political) comitee stewardship.
I think the EU Public sector has too much variance in it to be safely serviced by just one distro. Just thinking on the hifdes of legacy infrastructure that needs to be kept integrated (storage, auth, etc).
I think a better approach would be to have a programme in the EU to allow local administration and PS agencies to establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards would go a long way. Couple that with an incentive to utilize small shops for the execution instead of corporations and we might have a chance to emerge from the bug pile of mud that is current Public Sector IT before anybody else in the world.
> But I am concerned a "OS for the EU" Initiative will end up like all EU IT projects, that being smothered by red tape and (political) comitee stewardship.
No need to worry then, this is not a EU IT project at all, just some Internet rando using a misleading name for their pet project.
> just some Internet rando using a misleading name for their pet project.
Thank god someone said it, there are actually so many of these strange projects that try to promote some improvement for 'their' problems and propose them as required by the EU to adopt, without understanding the complexity that's actually involved in how the EU works. Another example I'm reminded of was last week someone shared their proposal for a unified API to access particular medical data, notably the API was suiting only their needs.
But what bothers me the most is the huburis in assuming they know better and so continue to insult the EU's current systems.
Of course things can be improved, but it's not some start up that you can just break things for 80% of your customers who can't migrate to the next API version.
Draft Version 2 of the EIF[2] was the subject of a political debate, where the main technology/commercial issues relate to the role of lobbying for proprietary software.[4]
EIF 2 was adopted by the European Commission as the Annex II - EIF (European Interoperability Framework) of the Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services” on 16 December 2010.[5]
> I think the EU Public sector has too much variance in it to be safely serviced by just one distro.
I think that's THE problem. Every member country has at least one duplicate of some public sector thing (tax agency, property/citizen registry, health registry etc.) and each of them does their thing slightly differently.
> I think a better approach would be to <...> allow local administration <...> establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards <...>.
Part of the problem are data schemas. Even if you mandate some common information exchange format, it is either somewhat opinionated on data schemas anyway or so generic that you need combinatorial explosion of custom middleware to align schemas. You just kick the can of pain down the road and eventually have a bunch of agencies that are in theory connected but cannot exchange data without "a project" anyway.
While slower and more painful to initially deploy, a much more fitting solution would be to have common open core software, enforcing common schemas, but allowing custom extensions/middleware.
> I think that's THE problem. Every member country has at least one duplicate of some public sector thing (tax agency, property/citizen registry, health registry etc.) and each of them does their thing slightly differently.
You say this as if it is a bad thing, this is part and parcel of how the EU works. It's not the same as a Federal system where there is one way and the rest are derivatives of it. There is more autonomy for each of the EU member states to do things how they want.
> But I am concerned a "OS for the EU" Initiative will end up like all EU IT projects, that being smothered by red tape and (political) comitee stewardship.
Having an os that could run to substitute much of the "regular" desktops used by public sectors in eu would be quite nice, without going as far as substituting old servers with windows 2012
From what I can remember from the "Munich Linux" days, the biggest two hurdles where that 1. all processes had proprietary data formats (Office, exchange and some Adobe stuff) as a de facto standard and it was hard fo move suppliers to open ones and 2. That even mundane Public Sector PCs needed to interface with weird/old/arcane storage or authentication protocols.
So while on the surface that Desktop is something that should work with oob Linux parts it ends up being much more involved once you try it.
It's a project whose intended audience is the EU, with (hopeful) eventual EU adoption.
It seems not worse than e.g an American activist labeling their initiative "The American ________ Project". It's perhaps misleading here because HN's (otherwise good) rules to prevent sensationalism in titles disallows the poster to contextualize a post, except in a comment.
"EU" is below the threshold of originality; it is not possible to "copyright" two letters, especially without any font or design associated with them.
Perhaps you are instead thinking of trademark protection? Trademark protection, of course, protects trademarks for particular specified industries and is scoped to nations where the holder does business/exists/has jurisdiction.
It's unlikely this will help, but it's 100% certain that copyright ain't gonna apply.
public sector needs to be using self hosted FOSS services and infrastructure.
a good exaple is the french gendamerie (police) they are using there own OS GendBuntu > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
a flavor of ubuntu made for taking depositions etc.
all while saving 50 million euros since the start of the prgram and switching 100.000 desktops to it
It really pisses me off when some kind of public service demands documents in the format docx or expects one such document to be filled and uploaded. They can't truly assume that every single citizen must have a license of Microsoft Office.
Symmetrically, every administration needs a form system and it annoys me that the French tax office didn’t open-source theirs, because it is decently good (Cerfa).
> EU OS is not a project of the European Union, but it should be.
Just flagging this because a lot of comment here and anywhere else EU OS gets discussed, end up assuming this is affiliated with the EU in some way.
It's not affiliated in any way, so whatever you feel about this project, and the EU as a political institution, you probably shouldn't infer anything about one based on the other.
The "EU" is not a political institution. It is a "a supranational political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe.".
The (main) political institutions of the EU are:
- the European Parliament,
- the European Council (of heads of state or government),
- the Council of the European Union (of member state ministers, a council for each area of responsibility),
Why does EU OS propose to rely on Fedora-based Linux distributions?
First of all, EU OS is not a product (yet), but only a Proof-of-Concept. The choice of Fedora-based Linux distributions or the desktop environment KDE is not a core concern as it does not impact much how admins manage users and their data, software and devices.
Nevertheless, EU OS cannot avoid to pick one base Linux distribution to start with. The founding project member Robert has previously used:
opensuse at home from about 2007 to 2024 (in 2007 distributed on 8 DVDs or so)
debian at the university department from 2007 to 2013
scientific linux at some research department from 2009 to 2011
opensuse Kalpa (in alpha) at home in 2024
Fedora Kinoite (stable) at home since 2024
Is EU OS a project of the European Union?
Right now, EU OS is not a project of the European Union. Instead, EU OS is a community-led Proof-of-Concept. This means it is lead by a community of volunteers and enthusisasts.
The project goal is to become a project of the European Commission in the future and use https://code.europa.eu. For this EU OS is in touch with the public administration on member state and EU level. So far, EU OS relies on https://gitlab.com/eu-os.
What we need at EU is a full build chain, infra and resourcing for one of the top-tier Linux distributions. Given the nature of Linux that's no easy thing but we're well placed to deliver on it. And I'd argue that it'll be cheaper to fund all of that as part of a generational (20 year) transition away from Microsoft for all key and 90% of non-key governmental systems.
Readit News
openSUSE has all their tooling based in EU ground. For example, OBS that is the build service, has the machines around Germany or Prague. A big bulk of the community is EU based, (with very relevant contributors from many other places), and SUSE, the company that is helping (via infra and some packages) is from Germany.
I do not known if sovereignty makes sense in the open source world, as at the end is a joint effort of multiple developers from many (and some times confronted) places, but if it does make sense then I would value more those other criteria.
Going with effing IBM is a really weird thing to do for his "Proof-of-Concept". Debian for its robustness or openSUSE for being distinctly european would have been much more inspiring.
https://blog.riemann.cc/resume/
As of February 2025, the Board has the following members:
It doesn't. I read stuff like this as a way to ride jingoist currents.
Especially not in a software sense as compared to hosting where as a general rule someother jurisdiction than your own is prefarable.
Maybe there is a need for some sort of "Programmer without borders" soon if FOSS turns too much to nationalist quarrel.
Those distributions are making huge efforts in keeping a core that is 100% reproducible, working upstream to fix issues, and providing reporting and tests tools to detect regressions (for example [2])
This is why a fork is usually a bad approach.
[1] https://reproducible-builds.org/who/projects/ [2] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Reproducible_Builds
After I left Univention behind, I migrated to JumpCloud. It has its faults. Linux support is also secondary to Windows support, but for me, it was several orders of magnitude easier to work with than Univention or Active Directory.
I miss NIS. It made many aspects of managing a collection of Linux machines much easier than anything to date. I hope that the future EU project does not adopt Univention, or anything like Active Directory. Instead, look to where NIS was successful, where JumpCloud is successful, and come up with a better solution overall.
I think the EU Public sector has too much variance in it to be safely serviced by just one distro. Just thinking on the hifdes of legacy infrastructure that needs to be kept integrated (storage, auth, etc).
I think a better approach would be to have a programme in the EU to allow local administration and PS agencies to establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards would go a long way. Couple that with an incentive to utilize small shops for the execution instead of corporations and we might have a chance to emerge from the bug pile of mud that is current Public Sector IT before anybody else in the world.
No need to worry then, this is not a EU IT project at all, just some Internet rando using a misleading name for their pet project.
Thank god someone said it, there are actually so many of these strange projects that try to promote some improvement for 'their' problems and propose them as required by the EU to adopt, without understanding the complexity that's actually involved in how the EU works. Another example I'm reminded of was last week someone shared their proposal for a unified API to access particular medical data, notably the API was suiting only their needs.
But what bothers me the most is the huburis in assuming they know better and so continue to insult the EU's current systems.
Of course things can be improved, but it's not some start up that you can just break things for 80% of your customers who can't migrate to the next API version.
> https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/interoperable-euro...
and this too
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Fram...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Fram...
quote
Draft Version 2 of the EIF[2] was the subject of a political debate, where the main technology/commercial issues relate to the role of lobbying for proprietary software.[4]
EIF 2 was adopted by the European Commission as the Annex II - EIF (European Interoperability Framework) of the Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services” on 16 December 2010.[5]
I think that's THE problem. Every member country has at least one duplicate of some public sector thing (tax agency, property/citizen registry, health registry etc.) and each of them does their thing slightly differently.
> I think a better approach would be to <...> allow local administration <...> establish their own FOSS desktop solutions and base information exchange on truly open standards <...>.
Part of the problem are data schemas. Even if you mandate some common information exchange format, it is either somewhat opinionated on data schemas anyway or so generic that you need combinatorial explosion of custom middleware to align schemas. You just kick the can of pain down the road and eventually have a bunch of agencies that are in theory connected but cannot exchange data without "a project" anyway.
While slower and more painful to initially deploy, a much more fitting solution would be to have common open core software, enforcing common schemas, but allowing custom extensions/middleware.
You say this as if it is a bad thing, this is part and parcel of how the EU works. It's not the same as a Federal system where there is one way and the rest are derivatives of it. There is more autonomy for each of the EU member states to do things how they want.
"All"? DNS4EU (https://www.joindns4.eu) seems to be progressing reasonably well.
By what metric would that be? Not doubting it but I've heard about it first a few days ago.
So while on the surface that Desktop is something that should work with oob Linux parts it ends up being much more involved once you try it.
Deleted Comment
I expect many more projects like this popping up, due to the current geopolitical environment
It seems not worse than e.g an American activist labeling their initiative "The American ________ Project". It's perhaps misleading here because HN's (otherwise good) rules to prevent sensationalism in titles disallows the poster to contextualize a post, except in a comment.
2) Is "American" (or "Chinese", etc.) trademarked?
Perhaps you are instead thinking of trademark protection? Trademark protection, of course, protects trademarks for particular specified industries and is scoped to nations where the holder does business/exists/has jurisdiction.
It's unlikely this will help, but it's 100% certain that copyright ain't gonna apply.
a good exaple is the french gendamerie (police) they are using there own OS GendBuntu > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu a flavor of ubuntu made for taking depositions etc.
all while saving 50 million euros since the start of the prgram and switching 100.000 desktops to it
case study: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/file...
Dead Comment
> EU OS is not a project of the European Union, but it should be.
Just flagging this because a lot of comment here and anywhere else EU OS gets discussed, end up assuming this is affiliated with the EU in some way.
It's not affiliated in any way, so whatever you feel about this project, and the EU as a political institution, you probably shouldn't infer anything about one based on the other.
The (main) political institutions of the EU are:
- the European Parliament,
- the European Council (of heads of state or government),
- the Council of the European Union (of member state ministers, a council for each area of responsibility),
- the European Commission,
- the Court of Justice of the European Union,
- the European Central Bank and
- the European Court of Auditors.
Why does EU OS propose to rely on Fedora-based Linux distributions?
First of all, EU OS is not a product (yet), but only a Proof-of-Concept. The choice of Fedora-based Linux distributions or the desktop environment KDE is not a core concern as it does not impact much how admins manage users and their data, software and devices.
Nevertheless, EU OS cannot avoid to pick one base Linux distribution to start with. The founding project member Robert has previously used:
opensuse at home from about 2007 to 2024 (in 2007 distributed on 8 DVDs or so) debian at the university department from 2007 to 2013 scientific linux at some research department from 2009 to 2011 opensuse Kalpa (in alpha) at home in 2024 Fedora Kinoite (stable) at home since 2024
Is EU OS a project of the European Union?
Right now, EU OS is not a project of the European Union. Instead, EU OS is a community-led Proof-of-Concept. This means it is lead by a community of volunteers and enthusisasts.
The project goal is to become a project of the European Commission in the future and use https://code.europa.eu. For this EU OS is in touch with the public administration on member state and EU level. So far, EU OS relies on https://gitlab.com/eu-os.