The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.
Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.
“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.
We’ve been the US’ bitch for far too long. It will be extremely difficult and painful to become independent
Silver lining is that’s a great opportunity for development. Even more so, we’ve seen how things play out when such platforms are left unchecked, so we can try to avoid the downfalls of big tech.
I push for FOSS everywhere I can at work, but then we acquire a company and they casually drop “oh yeah we’ve built $solution on Azure Containers using Azure SDN with Azure API Gateway and Azure LoadBalancer and Azure Firewall and Azure Backups and Azure Georedundancy and we use Azure SAST and Azure pipelines (replace with microsoft marketing lingo as applicable - I don’t care to learn it). Aside from that we’re vendor-agnostic”.
It’s astonishing how “we can use Azure/AWS but let’s not lock ourselves into proprietary solutions for which FOSS alternatives are readily available” is somehow a controversial statement in some software outfits. Ignoring the sovereignty concerns for a minute, from a business perspective you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping really hard that Microsoft or Amazon don’t pull a Broadcom and bankrupt you one day by hiking prices a few hundred percent.
It boggles the mind how existentially reliant most of the digital world is on the whims of like, three unchecked billionaires.
as someone in the US, I would likely welcome some EU competition, the US is just a bunch of monopolies and trying to stay ahead of the enshitification is turning into a skill in itself, but now with the presidency akin to the paid programming infomercials, open markets are going to get worse as the convicted rapist shits diaper and gets upset with which ever CEO in the room winces at the smell first
All the more reason to do it. Better a hard struggle with freedom at the end than being someones bitch forever
“European tech industry calls for buying European tech” like no shit? I entirely agree, but what else would they suggest?
My guess they recognise they lack visibility: People think there are no alternatives to big tech but other than hardware we’re not that dependent, especially in software. It’s a matter of switching to local or open alternatives which are ready now.
Yet government moves to Linux fall because it’s complicated. It’s not that simple unfortunately.
There needs to be a driving force (eg. Like china pushing it’s os, or maybe this one with captain orange)
Everything is driven by the end user. And unfortunately we are a gray continent so the younger generation must start.
Alternatively I can’t get my wife out of an iPhone because a Samsung is just to confusing.
What I can do in the background I do but it has to be easy and recognizable for 75% of the population.
Those failed Linux moves happened because governments are cheap and defer entire digitisation to municipalities and other local forms of government. It’s like there’s no planning of anything anymore („free market will solve everything”). It sounds ridiculous but even effing North Korea knows better.
If they were serious about it they’d hire couple of dozen open source software contributors first, do a small scale trial run where you iron out the kinks and submit patches where necessary and only then roll this out to regular govt clerks.
You can’t expect projects running on a shoestring budget to provide you with commercial grade solutions. Of course if you hire a big corpo that will promise you everything above but those somehow always turn out to be scams.
They went through the effort of creating their own fork, Limux. It has nothing to do with money (cant find the amount of money invested on the implementation btw) or deferring anything. No need to attach the process there. Yes, i’m sure there were some issues with printers and other stuff but that could be solved by replacement.
The problem was not Limux. The problem were the users as i pointed out. The Gray people and the “touchscreen” people that are stuck on something are going to rebel. As said before, your users need to be able to work with it and like it.
I consulted on multiple implementations and the main thing that matters to people for acceptance is: “is it sexy?”. If its sexy, people will adopt it easier. Linux at that time was generally looking blegh.
- Thunderbird -> Not sexy
- Firefox -> debatable, but not to sexy
- Limux with KDE -> absolutely not sexy
- OpenOffice --> Not sexy
Users have to get used to something different, big hurdle. When looking at it, it looks like garbage, no interest.
It all depends on acceptance.
It could be that it would succeed now because the UI has come a long way.
All you say is true but not impossible to solve with adequate funding. I’d argue that Windows and Office is so user hostile these days that the barrier to entry is much lower than usual. Have you tried to save a file in Excel in the last year or so? It’s like Office Guantanamo and people are increasingly fed up
Its good to see this movement is growing by the day.
Gotta say ironic that this is posted on a platform that’s from Yahoo (which is from a US investment agency)
Finally they recognize that there are alternatives to Google and Microsoft!
We don’t need to start with big products such as phones. Start small, such as moving off to a new email for personal use. Keep the gmail one for junk use (i.e: when signing up to services). Ask your closest friends to switch to Signal instead of WhatsApp. Use Firefox instead of Chrome (you can import all your browser settings). This process will take years and shouldn’t simply be a knee jerk reaction).
@[email protected] should be investing in opensource with much fervour. It keeps the keys out of the hands of a few and spreads the knowledge. Someone trained one closed system won’t have to relearn everything from another closed system. Countries will be able to adapt and solve issues across borders and efforts can be unified to secure software and infrastructure.
I recently switched of Dropbox in favour of Hetzner’s hosted Nextcloud deployment and I’m very happy. One step at a time, I’ll work towards being rid of corporate US tech.
Also, if anyone here is using Notion, you should check out Suite Numerque’s Docs which is an open source competitor being developed by the French, German, and Netherlands governments. It’s looking very promising. There’s scratchpad here you can use to try it out.
