Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert
Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist.
Latest Posts
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...
Advanced cloud services are based on good hardware, decent software, and surrounding infrastructure that combines these both into solid solutions that can be provided as a business activity. Europe is good with operating the hardware....
tl;dr: The European Commission is honestly asking for experts to advise them on ways to institute “effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement”. If you are an expert, I urge you to apply to join this group. You have until...
Zoals ik gisteren schreef, onze maatschappij en overheden draaien in steeds grotere mate op Amerikaanse clouds, en we maken ons hier nu terecht zorgen over. Want het is toch niet leuk dat de Amerikanen mee kunnen lezen in onze...
Onze maatschappij en overheden draaien in steeds grotere mate op Amerikaanse clouds, en we maken ons hier nu terecht zorgen over. Als we dit op willen lossen zullen er meer en betere Europese producten moeten gaan komen. En vervolgens...
De hele korte versie: De kern van de Nederlandse overheid draait nu op eigen emailservers, in eigen beheer. Op 14 oktober 2025 verloopt de ondersteuning op de gebruikte software. Microsoft stimuleert sterk om dan alle email over te...
Vanochtend 2 juni was er in de Tweede Kamer een nota overleg over de initiatiefnota “Wolken aan de Horizon” van Barbara Kathmann (GL-PvdA) en Jesse Six Dijkstra (NSC). Er is vandaag ook al een voorlopig verslag gepubliceerd door de...
So as a bit of a followup to my earlier post “What we in the open world are messing up in trying to compete with big tech ”: please (mostly) stop harassing people doing the right thing from the wrong platforms. We often see journalists,...
When Galileo (the European satellite navigation system) was proposed there was a lot of criticism. “We already have the US GPS”, and we’d always be able to rely on our historical partner to take care of us. The US very much also said...
Our societies and governments now largely run on American proprietary big-tech platforms. Many of us want to decrease this dependency, or even end it altogether. This article is part of a series of posts on (European) cloud challenges....
In the earlier post ‘But how to get to that European cloud?’ I alluded to a coherent strategy that might get us to such a non-US cloud. In the present article I hope to clarify what this could mean, and why I think it could work. Here I...
I do a lot of talks and because of this I also attend quite a lot of them. I’ve previously shared some hopefully useful advice on how to give a decent presentation. But there’s something I’d like to add. I’m still somewhat on hiatus, but...
The very brief version: “going to the cloud” can mean renting services/servers that you could get from anywhere. There’s little lock-in. The same four words “going to the cloud” might also mean locking your operations to a specific cloud...
It is written that into each life some rain must fall, and currently a lot is falling on my family. We’re getting very good care and lots of support, so please don’t worry about us. I’m told we’ll get out of this. Consider this my ‘out...
Ik moet ook nog even wennen aan het idee, maar “motie Cloud Kootwijk” is aangenomen (al heet ‘ie anders): "Motie van het lid Kathmann over een aanbesteding voor een rijkscloud in volledig Nederlands beheer" Deze motie kreeg van de...