Free Software and Standards - Not Marketing Blitz - Needed Amid Growing Severity of Dependency on Hostile Suppliers (or Another Country's Sovereignty)
The "supply chain" may one day be controlled by a direct enemy state
Europe, and the EU in particular, is treating the US as an untrustworthy ally (if an ally at all). We're not a political site, so we won't attempt to explain the "whys"; but it is what it is. Since Germany is the EU's most dominant economy, let's consider some news about "the Bundeswehr's federal IT systems house [...] sign[ing] a framework agreement with ZenDiS for the Office & Collaboration Suite openDesk as a sovereign workplace solution and for openCode as the infrastructure for a sovereign software supply chain. The initial term of the framework agreement is seven years."
There's this recent page about "sovereign communication and collaboration solutions" (automated translation):
ZenDiS (Zentrum Digitale Souveränität) can be described as the "Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration" and earlier this month we showed that adoption of GNU/Linux had soared in Germany.
An associate explains that there would be more to gain by going with self-hosted or standalone than by just trying one hosted service over another. And more important still would be open standards for the documents and that means ODF (OpenDocument Format) which is not even mentioned above.
The associate wonders: If something claims to be FOSS on paper but there are sufficient barriers to prevent anyone else from running or modifying it, it is truly FOSS?
Take this one relatively new example:
Notice what it says at the top. Is this openwashing? Where can the entire (and latest) stuff be downloaded? Looking at their main site, there's even less clarity:
"Right now, the only way to make Opendesk’s commercially is by joining our maker network as a professional maker," they say.
Following the link above:
What does this even mean?
The press release says "Open standards ensure interoperability, transparency and digital sovereignty". But from what we can gather, none of these can be assured. The "Head of Corporate Strategy & Communications" is basically a marketing person (in recent years many of these roles got rebranded as "communications", typically for reasons we covered in the past) who studied linguistics in Mainz:
We need more than buzzwords. We need technical substance. We need to see the licensing.
If salespeople and marketing staff make important decisions, then we're doomed to stay trapped. █