[jonathaneunice]

Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.

The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.

The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.

[ehnto]

I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.

[geek_at]

> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change

it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there

[drstewart]

How much have the "tarrifs" (sic) increased the cost of "US services" by to EU providers?