Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...
People need to stop buying into propaganda.
Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.
I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.
There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.
I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.
> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap
You answered your own question.
Not sure whether Excel is still good.
But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.
To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.
Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.
Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.
In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.
The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?
The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)
I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!
I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.
I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!
Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.
The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.
And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.
Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.
Why the difference?
Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.
The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.
IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.
Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).
Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).
Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.
Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).
True that. Also in many countries in Europe, IT jobs are not "special" anymore and salaries are similar to the median.
Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.
Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless
One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).
Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.
Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.
For example;
Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.
Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.
Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.
Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.
Has this actually produced any tangible results?
I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.
- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".
- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.
Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.
One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.
Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.
If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”
Feelings are different now. IIRC, the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American.
It has become broadly clear, that it is about self preservation.
That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".
Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.
And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?
Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.
This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.
The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"
This is false. Europe innovating and "carrying its own weight" means less market share for American companies, less American middlemen tapping into money moving throughout the European economy, less ability for American intelligence agencies to access European information, and less soft power from the threat of cutting off American technology.
Put me down as skeptical.
Headline could be “every country wants to end all reliance on US” and it would be the sane thing to do.
Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).
> Visa, Mastercard, Paypal
The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while
> all social media commonly used
I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam
The MIR payment system started functioning in 2015, long before Visa/Mastercard pulled out of Russia
>Android app store
Initially there was some fragmentation because several companies raced to develop "Russia's #1 answer to Google Play Store" but everyone eventually settled on RuStore developed by VK (Russia's Facebook).
Generally, Russia already had replacements for most major American services long before 2022, and with better market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/eBay/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight. Europe is at least 20 years late in the game.
If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting (and switch off all undocumented backdoors in your CPU's "management" engine). Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).
But one thing you have to understand is that being reliant on US tech and defence industry was seen as something very positive up till now. Heck most EU countries even let US/NSA tap our internet data. We bought US fighters jets mostly not for the specific jets but for being on good terms with the US.
We all knew that US screwed us a bit, like probably practicing industrial espionage against us as well as collecting data on our citizens, but we let that slip for being a part of the US security umbrella.
I would say that is one reason why we did not push for our own word processors and OSes.
The US was also very good at utilizing this relationship, buying up initiatives (remember Skype). Don't know if this was a strategy or not.
I suspect that this is going to change now trough public opinion and regulations. I made the switch from Anthropic to Mistral last week. One great thing with GDPR is that we can not place PII in US services, that have been very good for our own Software industry.
Yeah, right. ROTFL. With all NGOs sponsored by the US, which sustain all political parties in Europe, this will be verry, verry difficult.
Related recently:
European Alternatives
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731976
AWS European Sovereign Cloud
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640462
I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427582
Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635
Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902
'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
- 35h a week, doesn’t prevent engineers from working more legally (most do) - with the age of AI code velocity is no more about time spent, but fresh brain - And much much more important, it is significantly more efficient to have an employee 10 year in one place than 2 years in 5 places. What could explain higher US turnover than europe, you think?
I think all this nonsense can be traced back to USA abdicating its industry to China and over 20 years being completely hollowed out.
On this matter, the only way out, technically simple protocols but doing a good enough job allowing a small team of average devs or even an individual average dev to develop and maintain an alternative software with a reasonable amount of effort. That with some hardcore regulations to allow them to exist. Remember that nearly 100% of the only services were fine with the classic web, aka noscript/basic (x)html web (and if you add only the <video> and <audio> elements you are getting dangerously closer to those 100%)
Don't forget, you cannot compet on economic grounds and international finance, their thousands of billions of $ will wreck you. And china is on the other side of the spectrum. You will end-up crushed on both sides.
And first thing first: some high performance EU silicon (design and manufacturing)? But we all know the state-of-the-art silicon tech is an international effort.
defence grade effort at EU scale... oooof!
I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.
Also O365 just sucks. We can do better. We've had better. Please stop using MS products and technology stacks.
