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 the early 90s Internet in the NORDUnet space was so excellent. Plenty of great things coming out of universities during that time. Visiting some of these places now, they’re all rumning on either Google or O365 and American social media. IT departments don’t work with the faculties anymore. Etc etc
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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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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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