> it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).

Scaleway and OVH? Although I’m not sure how they compare at scale to AWS / Azure / GCP.

> It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).

But why is it about that? Why isn't it about e.g. governments in Europe funding the development of Linux virtualization so that it's simple to buy some hardware, put it in the back office and have an interface to it which is as easy for people to use as the incumbent cloud providers?

The vast majority of companies don't need "flexible scalability" etc. They have modest and finite loads and only ended up "in the cloud" because for ten seconds it seemed like having 100 VMs in the cloud was going to be a lot cheaper than having 100 physical servers, until it turns out that you can put those 100 VMs on two physical servers in your own possession and it costs less to do that than the cloud providers charge and then you keep control of your data and infrastructure.

> everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.

This is pretty wrong. Hardware companies sell hardware. A lot of them will try to lock you into their shitty software if you let them, but that is neither required nor desired. And some of the better ones don't, e.g. there isn't that much lock-in happening with AMD or Intel servers. We just need that to be happening for phones. And smart hardware companies can fully understand "commoditize your complement" as being in their own interest while still making a profit selling the hardware that isn't locked to any particular software.

> It makes no sense to try and fight this here

It's not clear what you're even suggesting.

Suppose you want Europeans to have access to a phone platform that isn't controlled by an American megacorp.

If they release a domestic proprietary one then other countries won't want any part of it. They don't want to be under the heel of a European megacorp any more than an American one, and indeed many will be suspicious of it and actively try to thwart adoption. And then you lose the network effect and can't get traction.

Whereas if you do something like require phone hardware to allow the user to replace the OS, and then fund development of open source phone operating systems and make sure they're required to be supported within your jurisdiction, then they can easily spread outside of your jurisdiction because people aren't nearly as suspicious and oppositional to something where you've precommitted to not putting people on the enshittification treadmill. And then everybody gets out from under the thumb of those corporations.

great counterpoint! (no i'm not an LLM, it is a actually a crucial perspective) i especially agree with > But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.

i am not advocating for a pure "open source will save the world" there are just a few points i'd like you to consider, and hopefully give me insights i can learn from

* other than code, open source has also given us governance "experiments" capable of running critical systems. As another poster was mentioning, the risk is to fallback on "big corps", usually run by "big man", and we are back to zero. The hope? expectations? is that the open source governance ecosystem has tackled this space in enough dimensions to be able to build something over this. I am looking specifically at the area around licenses (mariadb, redis, ...) and just overall governance frameworks, as in "deteach business ownership from ethical frameworks"

* in order to build anything this big/reliable, without megacorp budgets, you can just ... pay FLOSS? They are one of the 2 majorly screwed groups by the current SV setup (with PLENTY of cavaets,amongst them that SV is a huge open soure contributor) The other one being content creators. Slogan? "For this to succeed, you need the best coders and the best marketing departments in the world" Looks to me like incentives are aligned towards them being available. Talking broadly on a systemic level: details need refinement, and space beyond this single message.

* EU (the political instituion) desperately needs this. An innovative tech ecosystem (not startup, not product) driven by "european values" that puts them on the spot. Start with redefining it: there are no users, but citizens. Something effectively out-innovating SV, not just trying to get on par. The risk of "being bought out/copied" doesn't really apply, since (as I said in my original comment) the discriminator is existential: US companies cannot be trusted because they built the existing system. Any attempt to block this (stop users from getting their data back) is going to be challenged by the EU (GDPR violations cannot be brought to court by citizens, only by nation's data authorities, which means a citizen gets big guns and doesn't ned to pay). Also, go on and explain that to all you other (US and not) users.

* A EU cloud provider doesn't have to provide the same services an US provides. That would hardly be innovative. You also don't need to focus on corporations. Provide data storage for citizens, that will be the basis to build a privacy focus cloud, and then business might want that. There is a possible continuation into "advantages of storage&privacy based vs compute", that i skip.

But essentially, to me it seems that an open source, true, "give me back my data" business driven initiative has never been as actionable as now. I short, such a project can make 2 bold statements "We are more innovative than SV" "We have better freedoms than the US"