Yes, that’s only right and sensible.

Unfortunately, things are moving too slowly here in Germany, but at least one federal state, Schleswig-Holstein, plans to switch to Linux and LibreOffice in the fall.

I’m not aware of any other plans in other federal states or at the national level.

Bavaria, a deeply conservative federal state, even uses Palantir, which is just absurd.

I highly doubt that this will get anything moving: In 2020 the European Court of Justice already invalidated the Privacy Shield agreement with the US for precisely this reason.

The majority of EU-companies however just continued to use US services despite the fact that user data could be accessed by the US government at any time, contrary to EU data protection regulations, and even without a court order (patriot act and such). No effective penalties - or more like no penalties whatsoever - were imposed on those companies that simply ignored the ruling.

The end result was that the EU entered into a new agreement with the US, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) – just a new name: nothing has changed. European users’ data on US servers is still not protected in accordance with European law.

This statement only confirms what has long been known - nothing has changed.

So I can’t see why the EU would change course now, unfortunately. They could have years ago for the same reason but didn’t because, well, money…

Here in Germany, at least something is happening. Recently, for example, the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein decided to switch to Linux (and also LibreOffice), with the change planned for this fall.

Overall, however, far too little is happening in our country. The vast majority of federal states and the national government continue to rely on proprietary software (mainly from US corporations, especially Microsoft).

At the national level, this is hardly surprising, as our Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is more of a US lobbyist than a politician: Until 2020, he was on the supervisory board of Black Rock Germany and was also a long time chairman of the “Atlantik-Brücke”, a German-American lobby organization for economic relations (so on and so forth). Unfortunately, no change of course is to be expected from him — nor from his party, the conservative CDU, that is the most popular party for some strange reason.

In Bavaria, which is also deeply conservative, the federal state government is even considering introducing Palantir.

I don’t understand how all this can happen when it is perfectly obvious how vulnerable all these US products are making us – vulnerable to industrial espionage and worse - especially now that the US is developing into a fascist, unjust state.

But hey, I think we all have to remain somewhat positive despite all this. As I said, there is some movement in terms of FOSS —probably much more in other European countries than in Germany. So, slowly but steady, we’re moving forward! I really hope that’s how it is in the US as well.

Best of luck in these harsh times!

Still far too low, considering that the US is now a police state.