The whole Netherlands? What…?
The government. Read the article
never trust the americans again
I will be so pissed off when a democrat is elected and every single EU country will try to go back to business as usual
most things will, I doubt this will though.
it’s surprising that most countries didn’t see this as a national security threat to begin with, but here we are.
I think before the end of the current trump administration we’ll see a ban on using Linux within the US out of spite.
them not realizing or caring that 90% of the internet runs on *nixos derived software will only make things more chaotic.
I think that’s very likely over. You could argue and people did that one Trump term was just an anomaly. Two is much more difficult to explain away like that and I think Europe gets it now.
Dont worry that will never happen again.
Yeah that’s exactly the phrase no-one in the world will believe again for 15+ years
The U.S. imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court
…fuck this place.
Well the ICC isn’t amazing either. Historically it has been used as a tool to “prosecute” African individuals in western courts and has prosecuted literally 0 western war criminals, completely ignoring European crimes abroad. Whether imperialistic/colonialistic or just trying to establish itself as legitimate by prosecuting easy targets, African countries (who were initially all for the ICC because of their history with instability and war and were some of the main case referers early on) are withdrawing because of how “unbalanced” the justice is.
The ICC has never once prosecuted a european national, EVER, for war crimes.
A lot of regimes seeking to get rid of western mega-corporation exploitation are resorting to getting rid of as much western influence as possible, maybe because the frequency of European, american, and corporate sponsored coups.
But the US never recognized the ICC because they commit so many thousands of war crimes.
The US or the ICC?
not the ICC.
So the ICC won’t let me be
Or let me be me, so let me see
They tried to shut me down on MSNBC
But it feels so empty without me
I can explain a major reason why public services and administration are begrudgingly moving to FOSS or OSS at all. They need to apply security standards like ISO 27001 and when they start going through what the documentation requires they realize that most OSS let alone FOSS make it very hard to have any say in the development of the software.
How do you make sure that the security flaws are patched promptly? Do you open a ticket on GitHub and simply hope it gets picked up by the devs? I can tell you from experience that some OSS devs will tell you to make your own merge request if it’s so important to you. GDPR makes having vulnerable public facing services very unattractive. What about support for the product when you need something fixed or have an issue with running the software?
You can definitely get a license for an OSS, or get a legal agreement for support from the OSS devs for money. I can guarantee you that when managers in public services look at either patching together and managing a bunch of separate OSS or using Microsofts integrated infrastructure, they see the advantages right away.
That is the sad truth… It’s resource intensive and a regulatory problem to create and manage a whole infrastructure. It’s much easier to use integrated and centralized solutions.
Commercial support or if it’s critical enough infrastructure have a full time department/team to do it. Commercial support is the obvious choice for most countries starting out tbh.
Honestly SuSE, Ubuntu, and Hetzner all have good for enterprise support and its crazy that they don’t have more major gov business in the EU now.
But honestly yeah, pay for labour to maintain things. It’s not a breaking new idea. You can do that AND own the things instead of renting from private companies too. Also not a new idea.
The only thing new is that we are talking about computers and we have museums for them already so maybe get with the times, right?
Don’t get me started about ISO. They can go fuck themselves.
But that particular standard doesn’t apply to software. It applies to a company. Its a best practices, audited authoritative report. None of that means the software doesnt have backdoors, flaws, issues, its how they handle them.
Microsoft is a known ISO cheater, and will pay off companies or at least influence them, so I wouldn’t trust ISO or the auditors.
So now, any company that is willing to take on the challenge of being certified can use open source software (which actually is audit-able as opposed to Microsoft’s).
Seems like there is a path forward. Yes they may have to fund a project that helps audit, develop, or maintain critical software. If its open source, you have an entire world could also participate in securely developing software, in the open.
There is absolutely nothing preventing them from hiring a firm to develop a feature in FOSS. Hell, they can even keep it proprietary if they wanted to.
they can even keep it proprietary if they wanted to.
Yes, with the caveat that it would have to be an internal piece of software, or if it’s a public facing tool then it would have to be under a non-copyleft licence. But yeah, for 99% of use cases they could have a proprietary fork.
With non-free software, you have no say at all.
The problem you point out has been known in the Linux community for literally decades and is the reason why Red Hat Linux was created and any company can, right know, get an Enterprise version of it with an Enterprise support contract.
That said, over the years I worked in seriously large multinational companies which used Linux and other open source products like Apache extensively on the server side (pretty much all such machines had it) so at least on the server side things did change massively from back in the day when companies would get Sun servers with SunOS or IBM server with Minix rather than generic server PCs with Linux due to that rationale you stated.
In fact, it has also become a common thing in much smaller companies, though maybe not the small and micro-sized ones.
The reality on the ground at least on the server side and for infrastructure software is that companies did find a way to deal with the problem of not being able to get support contracts from many of the OSS apps makers, and did so either by just paying some company specialized in supporting it or by having their own developers - after all, it’s exactly the thing with OSS that any developer can change it hence you’re not limited to paying for support from a specific company that makes the software.
How do you make sure that the security flaws are patched promptly? Do you open a ticket on GitHub and simply hope it gets picked up by the devs?
No you dont expect free labour and pay them.
I’ve been doing a project https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-07-04-a-declaration-of-independence/ ever since Independence Day and I have been shocked by how insane the open-source tooling out there is now. NextCloud and Collabara alone solves 90% of company’s needs. ERPNEXT covers a huge swath in mid-range needs. I combine it with a mailcow server and Authentik for SSO and I am not sure how much else most businesses need. The whole stack is zero cost.
I’m in a local administration in France, it’s rapidly getting closer to home… Our higher-ups somehow decided a thourough Microsoft integration was a good idea like 5 years ago.
Seems like we’re just one political comment about support to the ICC to be in the same situation. And I mean, fuck it, we should be. But I am not happy about the shit we’ll have to go through to purge it all now.
If I can sell my house, I’ll do it. But I’m in the US. Sure do want out. My house has been on market for 5 months.
US: You want to cut us off? No! We cut you off!
NL: How petty are you?
US: Yes.
Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
I am in a large (couple thousand staff) company and I cant get why we dont selfhost everything. Like yeah it would have an upfront cost but the savings stack immediately. We spend like 30-50 a user for office access.
Copilot is so shit and we could build an alternative with relative ease and never pay again. It wouldnt be baked into teams but who gives a fuck.
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. 😒
But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA
Do US-Americans fell insulted if you call them just another american country?
Not OP, but I don’t understand your question.
As a US citizen, I try to say “The States” instead of America when talking about my country. I do that out of respect for all of the countries that call these two beautiful American continents home.
I admit to defaulting to “American” instead of a cumbersome “United Statesian” or the above “US Citizen.” But that’s what we grew up calling ourselves and told to call ourselves and our fellow countrymen.
“Just another American Country” seems like it would be insulting to Canada, Chile and all of our neighbors in between. I’m not sure my fellow Americans would even pick up that you were talking about the States unless you really layed on thick context.
Considering the Dutch have ASML,
That’s a card which only hurts ASML if played.
If ASML has many competitors, then yes.
If ASML had many customers, then yes.
Intel is ASML’s single largest customer, making up a full quarter of their income. TSMC is the next biggest, but all their current expansion is in USA, so they’d probably not be able to buy anything either.
Next then is Samsung who are also building out US fabs, but also new Korean fabs, so some of their business wouldn’t be allowed.
Global Foundries would also be out.
ASML would have to survive losing 60% or more of their current income. They’d be gone in a year since EU countries don’t/won’t subsidise semiconductors. (see: The loss of Qimonda, Global Foundries stuck on 28nm in EU forever, etc)
How much asml machine in the us rn ? That s not how stuff work
Tell us, how does “stuff work”? What up and running alternatives do the US have to ASML machines for latest generation high performance silicon? No matter where.
Look at asml client. Either us or Taiwan. They can’t skip that market. U dont have alternative to asml yet but asml has no alternative for client either. Also fab are long term devlopement thoses contract are already lock. And asml play by american rule regarding ban export and so more. Asml is never gonna ban the us. The us can but it serve them no purpose. Asml is a public traded company. If u think they gonna loose their biggest client… Idk what to say but that s unreal
ASML plays by US rules as long as things don’t escalate badly. Your arguments only work during nice weather. When things get tough, ASML is squarely located in the EU and will comply with local laws and law enforcement. That is a substantial risk for the US if it were to go for all out economic warfare, like forcing Microsoft to boycott EU customers.
Of course ASML has no interest in such a thing, nor does Microsoft. The Single Market is a very big market for Microsoft. Also, blowing it up would not just pulverise that market, it would lead to a collapse of most of the business outside of the US in the mid term.
So first part of your argument is saying it can happen and second part is saying why it won’t happen. Yeah I agree it won’t happen. And ms sell service wich isn’t the same as the fucking lithography that power everything advanced under the sun.
Ps : second time you intervenir on my comment to say I’m right by prefacing I’m wrong. Kinda funny. Waiting for the third time
You either deliberately misunderstand my arguments or really misunderstand them. The companies don’t want that of course, but it is not entirely in their control. The EU certainly doesn’t want it either. Regarding the US, it really depends. It depends on how much the strongman in DC fears that the other side can actually retaliate. A nuke’s value is not that it destroys everything, its value is that it could destroy everything. Russia would not have invaded an Ukraine with nukes, yet Ukraine would likely never used any nukes even if it had them.
Of course ASML is not the only economic nuke Europe has. If the US unleashes economic nukes on the EU by for example forcing Microsoft to block many or most services over night, the first response would be to threaten nuking the USD, with a believable threat scenario, but ASML would be a backup option.
Funny you took ukraine exemple, cause they had nuke. And u will never guess who sat with Russia to give them the guarantee they won’t keep their nuke. Anyway whatever you talk about it s far from reality. U could just find one export ban from the ue toward the usa that could help your point a lot dont you think ?
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it’s easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just
nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool>andexitwhen I’m done with it is magnificent.That’s the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I’ve been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don’t work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I’m really stoked about this.
Personally id say try it in a VM*. Home-manager and nix packages (and even flakes at this point) havent felt like experimental features for a good 5 years for me on NixOS
NixOS is great, but it definitely breaks things. It’s the way it works, though, not whether the software is bleeding edge. Nix lets a package specify its own dependencies, even if those dependencies conflict with those of another package. It does this by breaking the traditional POSIX file system structure that many programs assume they can depend on. It puts all sorts of things where they “don’t belong”, and then uses a small army of environment variables, scripts, and symlinks to stitch it back together so that no individual package realizes what happened. If you only use software from the package manager, this is often (but not always) seemless, but if you download stuff from the web, none of the system libraries it traditionally expects are there. Likewise, if you’re using Nix alongside something like Debian’s apt, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the two package managers doing things in two different ways causes some issues that are hard to interpret to the uninformed.
Microsoft office is still their best product but many words apps such as only office are becoming comparable. Microsoft Access and excels cross compatibility with other office apps is unmatched
They don’t even need to be comparable. Majority of people just need the basics or what Office 2013 had to offer. Now Office does too much and no copilot… if anything it’s getting worse now.
Yup. I haven’t bought any new Office keys since like 2020, and I never will. Keep the CoPilot away from my thoughts, geesh. I feel like a schizo when I use them.
So ironic after bending over time and time again for the US. Think ASML, think Nexperia. Fuck Rutte and Jette - mini Rutte wannabe.
US has been building soft power like this for decades, and Trump is pissing it all away.
If this process to get rid of dependency on US gets well underway, there’s no turning that ship. US won’t recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
I’ve been pro US imperialism for a while now, but honestly I’m glad that the rest of the world is shedding the worst of our power projection.
On one hand the heel position has really pushed a lot of the world in a positive direction, but there’s gotta be a better fucking way then, like you said destroying half a century of international relations and cooperation. That’s not to mention the bigger issue of US supported genocide in Palistein and the ethnic cleansing operation in the states, which I can’t excuse for any 4d accidently good things on the geopolitical scale.
US won’t recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
This is not a bad thing. Over dependency on any one nation or even a bloc of nations is a bad thing.
I can’t help but think the dependency on the US that has been created played some role in what’s happening now.
Well of course. The whole point of US trade policy was to maintain global dominance. You don’t think that politicians were sending money to other countries purely out of the goodness of their own heart, do you? … Of course some of them have good intentions some of the time, but let’s not pretend no other reasons came into consideration.
Honestly, I can see that. America has been top dog for so long, it doesn’t value what it has.
Not even that. I’m thinking too much money, power and influence all consolidated in one place.
The US has the most billionaires at 989 and I’m guessing of the remaining ~2400 billionaires in the world, a not insignificant amount have substantial interests in the US.
It’s good the rest of the world is watching it happen. I hope they’re taking notes because it’s not stopping in America.
Nope. The US isn’t teaching people to fish, its forcing them to learn How to to feed themselves. In the past they handed them the fish so they could control them. That power is lost now.
Microsoft: “No, not like that!”
And nothing of value was lost
in fact, things got better
