If the point of this fork is software for European government use, I think the name is right on the nose.

I doubt EuroOffice needs widespread adoption, honestly. If I understand it right, the project isn’t creating new document formats. They’re just creating new software to read and edit existing formats. Like with email, where there are a thousand different email apps and providers, but they’re all compatible, they can all send mail to one another, because they all use the same email protocol.

And if you don’t like how one email app is managed you can move to another. Just like the EU doesn’t like how Microsoft and Google will delete their politicians’ accounts on Donald Trump’s orders, so they’re moving to another.

And governments outside the EU can and should build their own open source software and apps so they can control their own software independently of the big multinational (which we now know means American) tech firms.

I mean to say, I wouldn’t want China or India or Indonesia or Brazil to use EuroOffice. I’d want them to build their own document apps, so that their governments’ work can be controlled by their governments and not by potentially hostile foreign political or corporate powers.

Let a thousand flowers bloom, right?

Yep. And I’d go further. Class mobility in the West is dead. No matter how smart and skilled and competent you are, you will never be one of the ultra-rich - and no matter how ignorant and incompetent one of the ultra-rich is, they’ll never lose enough money to become “merely” well off. The entire broken system, one that’s designed to funnel money from the working class to a handful of ultra-rich families, will keep making the rich richer no matter what they do.

We have a billionaire caste, not a billionaire class, and this story makes it painfully obvious.

And how do you , practically, do that?

Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.

Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.

Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.

Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work. No parent has time for that. And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.

I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.

That’s interesting. I had the same experience with Meshtastic - I ran it for a few months and almost all I saw were test messages and comments about the weather. That encourages me to dig out my radio bits and try MC 😆