Honestly, I'm not sure if you're a troll, or just someone who strongly believes if you don't do it your way, you're wrong.

I'm working in a research institution. We have limited funding from grants. We are doing X-Ray research, with detectors that output data on the order of 30GB a run, and there can be more than one run a day. This data, once generated, needs to be accessible by compute nodes, without hitting the acquisition disk. There isn't reliable down time between acquisitions, so rsyncs are hard to schedule. We also need to schedule backups, which is easier on central storage, as these acquisition machines move around, and aren't always up.

Laptops have trouble carrying around 30TB for analysis, and desktops aren't cost effective with that storage load. I could also go into the issue with data walking out the door, which may be prohibited, or desired depending on the situation.

On top of binary research data, there's all the program source, program binaries, infrastructure data, standard office documents etc.

I'm not sure about a content management system - we have a Wiki which is great, and SVN which is great, and Vault for Inventor source control, which is also great. For office documents, the closest thing I'm aware of is Sharepoint, which doesn't seem like anything I want to touch with a 10 ft pole. What else should I be looking at?

And how does it work for users who barely understand "save to this network folder"?

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Yaz

I'd love to know the better solution for Mac, Windows and Linux access to network shares, and the network shares have to be performant, local (i.e no cloud sync), not require paid software, and support several tens of terabytes per shared filesystem. Oh, and use Active Directory permissions...

I think the potential mistake here is that welfare isn't just a benefit for the people who don't pay. The people paying in to welfare get a benefit also. Less people dying in the streets. Less load on them for any family relative who hits hard times. Lower crime (the I have to steal this bread to eat today variety). Less disease going around due to no access to modern vaccines and antibiotics... Less revolutions and stupid guillotining people.

I don't know about you, but that's a pretty big benefit to me.

Google does have an effective monopoly in search, and it's not a bad idea to have some degree of regulation in place to make sure that it doesn't harm consumers. (Though nonsense like a 'right to be forgotten' is going too far, and should be dropped)

The problem is that that very well may not be the EU's only motive here. At about the same time that the charges were announced, Gunther Oettinger, the EU's Digital Commissioner gave a speech where he said:

A great challenge is also Europe's position in the development of the next digital platforms that will gradually replace the current Internet and mobile platforms. We have so far missed many opportunities in this field and our online businesses are today dependent on a few non-EU players world-wide: this must not be the case again in the future. ... We need European industry 4.0 champions to win the global game in industry 4.0. ... Industry in Europe should take the lead and become a major contributor to the next generation of digital platforms that will replace today's Web search engines, operating systems and social networks.

Maintaining a level playing field and ensuring fair competition is one thing. Using the law to rig the market in order to engage in protectionism, however, is not acceptable. If the EU wants to pursue Google, they're going to need to do so in a way that is justifiably beyond reproach. Otherwise it's relatively easy for Google to restructure the way it does business internationally to avoid the EU from having any power over them, while still offering its services to persons in the EU, and to have many people cheer them on in the process.