Given the rise of the boycott USA movement, the 800 billion € for military that may not be spent but not on US arms and the dominating presence of US tech in the EU, how can citizens voice their concern? @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu and @EC_OSPO@ec.social-network.europa.eu are on the fediverse, but the just seem like mouth piece without ears.
What can citizens do? Has the ship sailed already?
They need to get off Twitter. Go back to using the Press for official statements of high importance. And use Mastodon (Bluesky can interact with Mastodon instances in the future iirc) for rest. As a longer term project, move govt systems to Linux.
Anything server or database related is already on Linux. Managed by professionals. The problem are the desktops. Those still run windows, it’s a walled garden. Government windows licenses are dirt-cheap. support is ubiquitous and almost everyone knows how to work with windows. The cost of switching is just too high.
In my university, computers in the public rooms all ran Mint, and we had a working self-hosted mail platform. Here comes Microsoft and in a few months all computers are replaced by Windows machines and the email platform runs on Outlook. My previous university also had the same approach: all Microsoft products. I’d really love to know all the details of those deals. I know they offer scholarships and fund development programs (in exchange they make students dependent / educated only on MS products), but I still feel its a loss of freedom for all our institutions.