pabs3France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk
https://www.xda-developers.com/frances-government-ditching-windows-for-linux/
It is a step into the right direction.
Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.
To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs.
How will Europe solve these two?
No-one needs LLMs.
AI has no value.
The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.
Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.
But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.
Linus Torvalds created Linux as a student in Helsinki, Finnland. He later took U.S. citizenship and lives in Portland, Oregon, TTBOMK.
Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.
The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.
It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.
Funnily enough there is some level of control that can be exerted by the US gov via the distros (at least the major ones - see legalese restrictions on Redhat/Ubuntu etc when you want to download , stating the various US gov laws/sanctions that they follow) and also via the kernel - i think some time back Russian kernel maintainers were removed.
So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.
The “main guy” is Finnish. He also got American citizenship recently, but given the US has increased attacks on naturalised citizens [0] and has a history of this [1] it’s not a solid foundation.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...