Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by jorvi on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @03:01AM (#22746392)

In general (moreso focused on the EU than the Brits) I've never understood why the EU doesn't pump a billion a year, or a billion worth of dev hours a year into open source. That's an absolutely tiny, almost infitismal amount of EU budget (and even tinier for most member states their budget) and it would allow them to get out of the noose of closed source corporate support contracts and being beholden to foreign companies. Imagine how much a billion a year would accomplish spread over projects like LibreOffice, Matrix/Riot, an EU Linux distro, etc.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by barrkel on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @04:44AM (#22746845)

Whenever the government doles out money, the incentives are to do it in return for political favours. To counter that, various processes and institutions enforce checks and balances and accountability. In practice, that takes the form of grant applications, tendering, and the like. That then attracts a bunch of grifters who want to effectively steal the government's money, so the grant process get longer and more complex, and things get more bureaucratic with heavy-handed checks and balances.

If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another.

Incentives matter. Government incentives are to be popular, or attract the support of other people who are popular or influential. Being efficient or effective is only a small part of that. I don't know that there's a good solution to the incentive problem.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by mcny on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @06:35AM (#22747339)

> If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another.

I’d expect companies like Raytheon, Cerner, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and HPE/CSC/DXC to win a supermajority of those contracts.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by bdavis__ on Thursday April 02, 2020 @10:35AM (#22759420)

They probably would not even bid. Working on an OS project is fundamentally providing labor hours. Not high margin, no lock in, no investment and high profit tail on the business. It would end up going to little companies providing bodies at a low labor rate.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by gonzo41 on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @08:21AM (#22747881)

No way if those companies had to OS their code. You could pump money into OS slowly by making government departments pay a royalty to the maintainers/projects they work with. Things such as Drupal, Tomcat etc.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by hartem_ on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @03:27AM (#22746517)

Maybe because it wouldn’t solve the problem? Building a great product requires so much more than just the money needed to do it. If money was the only thing required, no startup would probably exist and everything would be built by either governments or large corporations.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by _ph_ on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @04:14AM (#22746721)

Well the idea would of course be to use the budget to invest into suitable European startups. To create a market, where startups could operate and innovate.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by tomcooks on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @05:43AM (#22747076)

EU already does more than that, together with funding they get in touch with FOSS developers.

Please check https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eu-fossa-2/news/how-c...

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by Nextgrid on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @08:42AM (#22747977)

The reason the "year of the Linux desktop" hasn't happened yet and open source hasn't conquered the consumer world isn't because of the lack of money. It's because none of the projects have a goal per-se; everyone works in their corner, on their own time, mostly just scratching their own itch. Donating money to them won't solve this problem. There's also a lack of certain skill sets like user experience design, project management, branding, etc.

If the EU wants an open-source conferencing solution they have to do it in-house (whether from scratch or fork an existing solution) and treat it like a business with a clear objective and actual employees (instead of benevolent devs donating their time & effort) including positions which open source projects often deem unnecessary like UI & UX design, and so on.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by Leherenn on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @04:33AM (#22746801)

It's not billions, but the EU is funding some open source software. https://hexus.net/tech/news/software/125747-14-open-source-p...

I think France is also funding/developing Matrix.

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Re:Trolls break into meetings on Zoom by input_sh on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @06:25AM (#22747287)

FOSSA focuses on security audits, not development per se.

There's also EU Public License (EUPL). One notable example of software that uses it is Pi-hole.

One more interesting thing I can think of is Joinup, whose idea is to share solutions between administrations in the EU: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/

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