I saw this on a Finnish post, so let me reformulate it a bit and post it in English.
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I saw this on a Finnish post, so let me reformulate it a bit and post it in English.
Finnish universities 1996:
"Here's an operating system we created for you. Here's a chat network we created you can use with the operating system."
Finnish universities 2026:
"We don't know how to replace Facebook for public communications."
Learned helplessness.
@anttipeltola
I was thinking the other day that a step to securing an open internet would be for a collaborative state organisation such as the European Union to organise and fund an explicitly non-political org for the creation and management of an open standards browser (with plugins framework) -
I saw this on a Finnish post, so let me reformulate it a bit and post it in English.
Finnish universities 1996:
"Here's an operating system we created for you. Here's a chat network we created you can use with the operating system."
Finnish universities 2026:
"We don't know how to replace Facebook for public communications."
Learned helplessness.
@anttipeltola Meanwhile a certain Finnish student:
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@StryderNotavi @funambolo @anttipeltola oh yes. running on cloud, vendors are also less incentivized to write efficient code. if they spend a million on aws anyways, they won’t mind a 200k software license on top of that. You’ll have a harder time selling the same solution if your software runs just fine on just 2 servers from 5 years ago.
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I saw this on a Finnish post, so let me reformulate it a bit and post it in English.
Finnish universities 1996:
"Here's an operating system we created for you. Here's a chat network we created you can use with the operating system."
Finnish universities 2026:
"We don't know how to replace Facebook for public communications."
Learned helplessness.
@anttipeltola in fairness, when you want to do public communications, you can't ask the public to come to you
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I saw this on a Finnish post, so let me reformulate it a bit and post it in English.
Finnish universities 1996:
"Here's an operating system we created for you. Here's a chat network we created you can use with the operating system."
Finnish universities 2026:
"We don't know how to replace Facebook for public communications."
Learned helplessness.
@anttipeltola German universities in 2002: we use Java on Windows because it was there. German universities today: we don't understand the problem, we use X and Tiktok, plus you can follow a small subset of classes on MS Teams.
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@anttipeltola exactly. It is also absurd how the public sector believes it is ok to pay hundreds of millions of euros to U.S. companies instead of probably spending a fraction of that money build their own solution based on existing open source code and open standard.
@funambolo @anttipeltola And as the public sector is mainly financed through taxes taken from the workforce, it's a shame.
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I saw this on a Finnish post, so let me reformulate it a bit and post it in English.
Finnish universities 1996:
"Here's an operating system we created for you. Here's a chat network we created you can use with the operating system."
Finnish universities 2026:
"We don't know how to replace Facebook for public communications."
Learned helplessness.
@anttipeltola hard to vibe code an os Kernel...
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@uint8_t most of these services are overcharged for what you get and they are built on top of free labor. @funambolo @anttipeltola
Office 365 / Microsoft 365 / Microsoft Copilot / whatever they are calling it this week has some 400-450 million users worldwide, give or take. I don't know what the *average* price per seat is for that, but listed prices in Europe are around €10/month/user. That'd be some 50-55 billion euros per year.
I would argue that we collectively are *not* getting several tens of billions of euros per year of added value over alternatives out of the deal.
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Office 365 / Microsoft 365 / Microsoft Copilot / whatever they are calling it this week has some 400-450 million users worldwide, give or take. I don't know what the *average* price per seat is for that, but listed prices in Europe are around €10/month/user. That'd be some 50-55 billion euros per year.
I would argue that we collectively are *not* getting several tens of billions of euros per year of added value over alternatives out of the deal.
Borrowing the thread briefly but https://michael.kjorling.se/blog/2025/microsoft-365-switch-donate/ (which I wrote about a year ago) goes into a little more depth about that, and I think shows just how little value we're getting out of the deal compared to what we *could* get if all of the money paid actually went toward developing the software, by example of LibreOffice.
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Borrowing the thread briefly but https://michael.kjorling.se/blog/2025/microsoft-365-switch-donate/ (which I wrote about a year ago) goes into a little more depth about that, and I think shows just how little value we're getting out of the deal compared to what we *could* get if all of the money paid actually went toward developing the software, by example of LibreOffice.
@mkj @Mellivora @uint8_t @anttipeltola that blog post was a good read. I think the Big Tech has always worked on the "divide and conquer" principle - it has always been easiest to "just pay" and be done with it.
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@mkj @Mellivora @uint8_t @anttipeltola that blog post was a good read. I think the Big Tech has always worked on the "divide and conquer" principle - it has always been easiest to "just pay" and be done with it.
@funambolo Also similarly, how little it *really* takes on a per-user basis to make a huge difference for a free software project with any sort of wide appeal.
There are people who are genuinely going to be strapped for cash. Fine. But if someone can afford to pay ~ €10/month for Microsoft's offering, and switch to LibreOffice instead, they probably *can* afford to pay € 2-3/month for that even though it's not required. If lots of people do that, it'll add up.
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@anttipeltola exactly. It is also absurd how the public sector believes it is ok to pay hundreds of millions of euros to U.S. companies instead of probably spending a fraction of that money build their own solution based on existing open source code and open standard.
Universities still do cool things in Finland. The Finnish space industry got a big boost from essentially an university project.
Hopefully stuff like that still keeps happening.
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@anttipeltola exactly. It is also absurd how the public sector believes it is ok to pay hundreds of millions of euros to U.S. companies instead of probably spending a fraction of that money build their own solution based on existing open source code and open standard.
@funambolo @anttipeltola This is exactly what @zendis is trying to do with https://www.opendesk.eu/en in Germany … and beyond; the ICC is to switch to openDesk, too: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/international-criminal-court-invests-open-infrastructure
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