Politics Will Impact Software Choices
Recent: Europe Needs to Move Away From GAFAM; The Sooner, the Better | Scandinavia Saying Goodbye to Microsoft
We're not a political site, but we must face the reality that world politics or geopolitics are causing many companies - notably GAFAM but also others (e.g. IBM, Intel, Oracle) - to lose major contracts inside the US and outside the US. The same person who lied at the start of this year about "investment" in slop is trying to tell Europe that it's safe to rely on Microsoft, even if European courts are sabotaged by Microsoft deliberately, as last noted in hindsight a couple of days ago.
3 months ago we said that IBM would not be a trustworthy provider/supplier for Europe and we mentioned it again several times yesterday. There are various distros developed locally in Europe and elsewhere; they minimise use of "American" components.
A decade ago, back when the US-China relations were mostly amicable (under Obama) I envisioned the Chinese authorities adopting some GNU/Linux distro, such as Kylin or Deepin - based on Debian and Ubuntu, respectively. In recent months, as per the sister site, we see China insisting on making its own operating systems. Those are only partly based on Linux and Android (for compatibility purposes), but they're developed and controlled by Chinese firms. Last year we saw HyperOS mentioned and it was again brought up yesterday. Xiaomi already has version 2 of it:
Android's dominance (or put another way, monoculture) will be challenged in a "multi-polar" world.
Will those systems respect users' freedom? That's the key question. █