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[return to "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."]
1. cmiles+Tf[view] [source] 2026-01-26 17:31:32
>>bwb+(OP)
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.

The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

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2. jorvi+4l[view] [source] 2026-01-26 17:49:40
>>cmiles+Tf
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.

Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.

Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.

Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.

The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?

One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.

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3. omnimu+aB[view] [source] 2026-01-26 18:59:16
>>jorvi+4l
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.

But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.

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4. pbmons+cQ2[view] [source] 2026-01-27 11:28:47
>>omnimu+aB
> The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.

Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.

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