> [Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragte Ulrich] Kelber verweist auf die Entwicklungen in Frankreich. Dort wird eine Whatsappalternative auf Basis des Open-Source-Team-Messengers Matrix und dessen Client Riot entwickelt. In Frankreich "geht man aktuell einen hervorragenden Weg, um sich aus der faktisch in weiten Bereichen der Verwaltung bestehenden Abhängigkeit von Produkten großer amerikanischer IT-Firmen zu lösen", sagte Kleber.
or in English:
> Federal Data Protection Officer, Ulrich Kelber refers to the developments in France. A Whatsapp alternative based on the open source team messenger Matrix and its client Riot is being developed there. In France, "there is currently an excellent way to free oneself from the fact that many areas of administration are actually dependent on the products of large American IT companies," said Kleber.
from https://www.golem.de/news/whatsapp-matrix-oder-xmpp-bmi-such...
I tend to think the political machinery isn’t afraid of proprietary/monopoly dependency in general, the issue is rather with those companies not being domestic.
> Open standards must be used in the implementation and operation of digital offerings. The source code from the realization of digital offerings by the administration (in-house development) is made available as open source, i.e., in reusable form, wherever possible. https://www.it-planungsrat.de/fileadmin/beschluesse/2020/Bes...
They are also starting a project to host public, open source code which is backed by the federal CIO and many state and local governments: https://www.cio.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/DE/2021/pm_...
This is not something sneaked in by some techies. Every decision maker is probably aware by now what "open source" means.
> Secretary: "IT said we should use matrix".
> Minister: "Whatever. I'm busy with other things. Do I need to sign something?"