2025-08-13 20:10:53
I just got back from the most awesome WHY2025, the tenth installment of the four-yearly Dutch hacker festival series. I’ve been attending these things since 1993, so it is a big deal for me. By being among the hacker community for nearly a week, you start seeing the world differently. I usually spend (too much) time on policy and writing stuff, and this was a much needed reset. My badge for HEU 1993, the first Dutch hacker camp
2025-08-05 16:22:51
Na bijna een jaar werk publiceerde de overheid recent alsnog de Nederlandse Digitaliseringsstrategie (ik heb ook een klein beetje bij mogen dragen), met daarin gevleugelde woorden als “Nederland moet de kansen die digitalisering biedt pakken. Met de NDS moeten we vernieuwen en blijven investeren in ons digitaal fundament”. En ook, “We kunnen onze digitale ambities alleen waarmaken als we beschikken over voldoende digitaliseringskennis binnen de overheid.” Vorige week startte de werving van een nieuwe plaatsvervangende Rijks Chief Technology Officer (CTO), wat een mooi begin zou kunnen zijn van dit beleid.
2025-07-24 22:10:37
The short version For decades, governments and organizations could run services based on servers we actually owned. These days, we’ve allowed the IT world to convince us no computing is possible outside of US-style clouds, for which we have no European equivalents. And because of this conviction, we are now moving our most precious data and most critical services to US controlled servers. Yet most of European government software still runs on locally owned systems.
2025-07-11 18:10:00
Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about the cloud, and what it means for Europe. Here I want to pull the various articles together into a coherent story. Note, nothing of what follows is in any way novel or original. While the facts presented in the articles are pretty inconvenient and in parts depressing, they are not controversial (or should not be). To get updates when I post something new, do subscribe to my mailing list.
2025-07-11 18:03:55
A brief addition to the 50000 words I wrote earlier on the cloud: what is the European situation? Software Initially, companies and governments would buy licenses to software. You’d typically have a piece of software in your office, on one of your computers, to calculate payroll with. Most other computers would have copies of WordPerfect installed. This software would function for years without updates or maintenance. If WordPerfect-the-company would disappear, you would not even notice.
2025-07-11 16:20:53
There is a lot of recent discussion about digital autonomy and Europe’s “position in the cloud”. Here, I want to break down and refute a commonly made argument: that the lead of American cloud providers is so great that we can never catch up. In the recent and excellent policy initiative “Clouds on the Horizon” (by Dutch political parties GL-PvdA and NSC), we can read on page 23 why this can’t be a reason to just give up.
