À dieu Windows

Massive middle finger to US sourced IT

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Might not happen in that time frame but it sends a massive message to the US. Well done France.

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What does that mean for the rest of us, more confusion or business as usual? Is Linus European, even French, then?

Good luck to everyone in IT!

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Linux isn’t owned by anyone, it’s open source and you’ll need the techno heads on the site to explain it properly to you. My OH has been trying to tell me but lost me after the first 10 minutes!

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No he’s Charlie Browns friend :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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I had been thinking about this as a possibility but I don’t think it’s very practical.

I struggle to think how on earth the world could extract itself from US technology. I know if forced on us we’d have to do it, but voluntarily it would be hard.

Making good on promises to ensure US big tech actually pay relative taxes to support social costs in accordance with other businesses in countries they currently earn a lot in, but don’t currently pay much tax in, would impress me more. So Google, Meta/Facebook et al paying proper taxes instead of letting them hide in opaque jurisdictions and abuse transfer pricing.

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Linus is, indeed, European as he is a Finnish citizen though he lives in the 'States these days.

But as @Debby_Wade says Linux is Open Source so there is no single manufacturer. It is also significantly easier for governments to audit system security themselves and it is way easier to prevent it leaking information back to the Mothership, and no need to be locked into having an account with the vendor - unlike Microsoft products.

The best known of the European distributions are probably Ubuntu(UK) and Suse (Germany) but there are even a few French ones.

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Why not?

People learnt to use Windows, they will learn to use Linux and things like mint are really easy, even I managed it

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That would also be worthwhile but the advantage of Linux over Windows is very much one of putting control back in the hands of the user - corporate use of Windows, for instance requires having a Microsoft user account, and accepting a huge amount od data going back to Microsoft who can effectively turn off your access to your own machines on a whim.

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The problem is so much software that is used including in businesses nowadays, is of US origin. As are companies like Amazon, sorry, LBC is simply not a substitute in so many ways.

And it’d be pretty horrible if, say, China were to step into the gap.

It would be interesting to understand the level of penetration of the Israelis into whatever else we might use.

The Orange one’s destruction of value and its consequences just seems to go on and on. Are we at least halfway through its term yet?

Yes, but there are open source alternatives to quite a lot of it.

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Will MacBooks also be on the Naughty Step?

Hopefully, yes.

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They’re still using MSOffice formats as the default export choice for the office software apps they’ve chosen.

Good luck buying a French-made laptop that is entirely home-grown and not manufactured in China using zero US-derived components or intellectual property. :smiley:

We live in a globally connected world - while I appreciate the reasons for not wanting to be dependent on tech produced in a country led by a capricious ignorant and illogical President, it’s just not realistic for any nation to be fully self-reliant in tech or any other field.

Also decreasing trade between nations helps nobody (see also Trump’s tariffs).

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Germany in particular has a long history of trying to switch public sector workers from Windows/Office etc to Open Source alternatives, many of which failed for varying reasons, usually not technical. There was another push a few years ago in Schleswig-Holstein to do this.

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Just looked up how it went, and it’s very successful. And the OSOR website has loads of useful stuff on Open Source implementation.

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I’ve used only Linux for over 25 years.

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