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I would be pretty happy if the EU ploughed a load of money into a FOSS office suite on an ongoing basis.



Import substitution is one of these ideas that sounds great but seldom works out as intended. Bureaucracies instead of markets now pick winners, and their picks tend to be significantly worse. I really hope they are smart about it and treat this as a measured retaliation against easily substitutable products like twitter, Facebook and gmail, maybe cloud hosting and Amazon marketplace. There is zero chance of any initiative to produce a competitive office suite or operating system, but there will be undoubtedly real pressure to burn billions of taxpayer euros to try exactly that.


I sort of agree, except they are already picking by making Office their IT procurement choice. Choosing to only use documents in .odf format would definitely do something, and they could start funding bugs etc in whatever libraries/office software would bring value to their org.




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