Rea­ding that the Ger­man For­eign Minis­try is about to change their com­pu­ting desk­tops back from a GNU/Linux-based sys­tem to Micro­soft Win­dows and their Office offe­rings, a thing that has been on my mind for a while comes back again.
I think it would be very worthwhile to start an initia­tive to fos­ter euro­pean soft­ware; I think that whe­re­ver soft­ware pro­du­ced in europe is avail­able, it should be favored over other pro­ducts. There are euro­pean ope­ra­ting sys­tem ven­dors – espe­cially in the GNU/Linux arena. Why are they not get­ting the money, but rather the big ven­dor from Red­mont?
There also is the point that I think par­ti­cu­larly for sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, an ope­ra­ting sys­tem where the code can be audi­ted and tra­ced is a good idea. I am not sure that you should be trus­ting the ope­ra­ti­ons of a highly sen­si­tive net­work to a com­pany that is not all trans­pa­rent about it moti­ves, or its poten­tial con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity in its home coun­try.
I think that stra­te­gic invest­ments would also do won­ders to sti­mu­late activity in the soft­ware mar­ket. Working towards the goal of ero­ding Microsoft’s domi­nance would be a good thing in my book. Con­side­ring that there have been many pus­hes towards fos­te­ring some­thing like a euro­pean (or ger­man, or bri­tish or …) Sili­con Val­ley, this could just be the way to get the euro­pean soft­ware indus­try to focus on pro­vi­ding com­pe­ti­tive offe­rings for basic func­tio­na­lity like office and desk­top ope­ra­ting systems.