France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
(apnews.com)804 points by AareyBaba 10 hours ago
804 points by AareyBaba 10 hours ago
It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.
From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.
We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.
It’s in the US’s best interests to be a rule follower. It maintains our status as a global reserve currency. It gives our passports access to almost every country without visas. It attracts foreign investment.
As a US citizen, it is incredibly in my selfish interest for the US to not be a shitty friend. Just as it is in our selfish interest to promote democracy, less corruption, and free markets.
While I agree with those things, morally, they are also in the pure self-interest of the United States.
They are the ones that get to face almost all of the consequences from their government. And they know that if the people that voted on their current government don't get severally punished, things will only escalate.
The only people who hate Americans as much as (or more than) Europeans are Americans.
So story time. About 8 years ago, most of corporate America tried to do this. It was called the ad-pocalypse. They came crawling back to SV in less than 2 months. Turns out, the correct response to an organized (politically based) pressure campaign is to tell them to pound sand.
When your customers see the dev bill (what it costs to make software that actually works and doesn't get its secrets stolen), they will do the same. But not after some LLM based disasters cause some chaos. Should make your life more interesting, no?
Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin
I would say with basically 100% certainty who they voted for, for president.
Cognitive bias is brutal. They have no idea what they are doing to their own self interests.
The selection of Americans commenting generally aren't suffering, and won't be suffering under any circumstances. They're upset that the institutions that they worship and rely on for their own professional legitimacy are now all under a buffoon, game show host, and professional wrestling valet. It calls into question the "meritocracy" that they believe rewards them for all their hard work.
They blame this on the people who lack merit, and didn't study hard enough to get their share of the highest profit margins in history. They want them to be punished. The people who actually do and make things, rather than shuffling things around, marketing things and sending emails.
It's no wonder that they hope for some sort of punishment to force people to flock to them. US Liberals offer working people absolutely nothing but mockery. The only reason they have a chance at getting back into government is because Trump's corruption will keep the people who voted for him from voting at all. MAGA (with fellow-travelers who voted for him while holding their noses, repulsed by the alternative) is falling apart over foreign wars, Epstein, and H1Bs, not any of the middle class lib objections. Democrats also will give you war, Epstein and H1B.
The midterms, and the next election, will be won by the side that has managed to disillusion slightly fewer voters to the entire democratic process. I'm sorry, but that still bodes well for the loudmouth strongman.
Yep, and watching many of my peers in tech get red pilled and vote for this administration, or even be active participants in it, has been very hard to stomach. Financial penalties might be the only thing that gets them to realize the error of their ways
I think it’s also healthy overall for there to be multiple competitors in the market versus the tech monopolies we have now that have started abusing their customers.
Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.
>We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement.
How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
America is "Three Corporations in A Trench Coat"?
Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.
But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.
> anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America
They are more to the left of the population, yes. But nothing about them or the current left in the US is liberal in any real way anymore. The Dems are nothing like they were before about 2008 and the policies they push are very very different from the ones passed in that era.
PS Liberal means French enlightenment ideals which (for example) includes meritocracy as a core tenant.
There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies.
If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.
Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".
More information here:
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover...
(0ct 2025)
Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app:
Just goes to show how many structural problems there are to starting tech companies in Europe.
Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.
There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
Also culture. I had a friend try with several German companies, but she said the leadership would default to "no", and every decision would need too much review. She even worked with some that opened offices in SF hoping to learn to move fast, but even those were way too cautious to succeed. Lots of premature optimization, and trying to establish structures and systems before any proof of concepts could be made. Obviously, this is just anecdotal but she had a real desire to have European growth in SF communities.
I don't think capital is that much of a problem.
We have it, and it's been growing consistently.
What we lack is risk appetite, young people dreaming to be entrepreneurs, talent, a truly unified market, regulations and proper corporate law. Say what you want but stock options essentially don't exist in Europe, so you either give equity upfront or you don't at all.
I kind of wonder, capital wise. the GDP isn't too far off US and there's def companies/families w/ insane amount of capital esp in luxury goods etc. Unless they're just hoarding it like Smaug and not investing it back into the economy, in which case the problem isn't capital but business culture.
European per capita GDP is half of the US average. Total GDP is between 60-75% of the US with an extra ~15% population. I'm sure Europe does have enough capital to do this build-out but its a shrinking pool as Europe loses ground to the US every year.
It could be similar to when China kicked out a lot of non-domestic players. They even had a nickname for it. From the link below.
Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口
n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.
https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...
> to sell support and customization of open source software to government players
Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.
There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.
This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population.
I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.
As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
>and no significant large technology companies
I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.
That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.
Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.
> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap
Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".
-> ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares.
There is not ONE person that works in Finance or Accounting, at least in the US and Europe, that doesn't know "what SAP does", even if they have never used one of their products.
> Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp
Because it's very hard to compete against monopolies when there are network effects. What you can do is regulate them. The US government has been working very hard in the last decades to prevent that.
Recommended: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
"regulate them" has mostly translated to "tax the most successful players in the form of non-compliance fees from byzantine EU regulatory structures".
I don't think the thing holding back Europe's tech market is that the US encourages allies to not allow backdooring proprietary software, or the cries that it's unfair that the US doesn't strangle their own tech market with equally burdensome regulation. The problem Europe's tech industry has faced is that the EU killed it in the crib with regulations, and now there's more fear of "what if there are bad side effects in being successful" than there is fear of never being successful.
Yes, it'd be great if there was a thriving market of mid-sized EU tech companies working in a well-regulated and consumer friendly market. There just isn't, though. I'm generally a fan of Doctorow, but the idea that the EU is just a few hackers reverse-engineering a new client for teams/youtube/whatsapp away from that world is hard for me to see.
You're missing Signal which has gained a lot of traction in the last years.
Apart from that it's hard to take statements from such an ignorant US centristic point of view about what europe is/has/has not seriously.
Let's see how things will play out for europe and how our souvereignty efforts will impact the US economy.
>Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet?
Yes of course I can be honest. We don't have any of that. But if I'd sketch out a genuine European future in software to me it would look something like this. You have technologies like Tim Berner Lee's Solid[1] and social protocols like Mastodon/Bluesky/etc owned as public infrastructure and operated by its people. You could imagine each region of Europe having its own sovereign digital space federated with individuals owning their data, a genuine network mirroring the region as it is.
The big problem with this isn't just technical, it's mental. The user of today anywhere is a consumer. It's like turning a serf into a citizen. I don't think this is a five year vision, it's more like a 50 year program. I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.
> and no significant large technology companies
I can only assume this is a comparison to the US
The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.
Bigger is not always better
Sure, but at least you have homegrown car companies. They make cutting edge cars that are mainstream, and even popular abroad.
You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.
Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.
You say stuff like this, and then simultaneously complain when the US winds up owning the entire technology stack and being the predominate western superpower.
So which is it? Does scale not matter, or are you unhappy with the outcome of ignoring it?
That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive. It was the right call, by the US, to put things in this way, but the European disadvantage is not for technical merits.
> This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive.
Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.
I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.
And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.
In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.
Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.
> which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.
I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software, nor is being a majority contributor. These things are very obvious to anyone that regularly works with FOSS in a professional capacity.
Could you elaborate? <https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/digital-sovereignt...>
On a side and more general note: "Global Innovation Index 2025"
"Europe hosts 15 economies ranked among the global top 25, including six in the top 10. Switzerland (1st) retains the global lead, followed by Sweden (2nd), the United Kingdom (6th) and Finland (7th). Thirteen out of 39 European economies covered moved up the ranks, marking a notable increase from nine last year.
Notable movers include Ireland (18th), Belgium (21st) and Norway (20th), which breaks into the top 20.
Eastern European economies also show solid momentum. Lithuania (33rd) leads globally for unicorn valuation and digital innovation – with leading positions in app creation, ICT use and Knowledge-intensive employment.Europe is also home to dynamic innovation clusters, led by Germany with seven clusters and the United Kingdom with four, including Cambridge and Oxford. However, European innovation clusters trail the US in venture capital strength."
<https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2025/article_0009...>
It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)
After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.
Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
Due to the way Microsoft does sales to enterprises, there’s no incentive for its software to be any good or even compete directly with anyone else… as long as it ticks the right boxes, the people making purchasing decisions are fine with it (it’s bundled in with something critical like Excel anyway).
If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.
This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.
Despite their confusion as to whether they want to really support their free and open source versions (without some absurd user count cliff), Mattermost (https://mattermost.com) is quite excellent and IMO is better than Slack. For example, editor leans towards native Markdown so things like syntax highlighting with backticks work as you expect.
Their recent update removed the paywall from SSO (and unfortunately the Gitlab SSO workaround) for social logins up to 100 seats, afterwards there's an absurd per seat cost similar to its non-open source brethren. One day if needed, I plan to drop-in an SSO middleman allowing anyone to leverage their own SSO layer (which will map to the login form with username/password) to avoid the SSO limits altogether. Though good enough for my needs, and likely yours too. Especially if you're open to paying for their seats.
I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.
Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.
I was going to say 'No way, profit > idealistic moral virtues'. But I could totally see Europe knee capping themselves. Look at how their food is inferior to the US because they stick to tradition.
I can totally see themselves doing this out of pride/humiliation.
Yes, and it's clear European governments are just catching up to the sentiment of European people.
Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this
The first sentence of the article:
> In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.
I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.
To me "homegrown video conference system" would mean like made in France by a French company, not made by the French government. I could be wrong but chat systems seem dynamic and important enough I wouldn't want it to be run and managed by the government. It will be interesting to see how it pans out though, and it's always nice to have more open source code
Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.
Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.
Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.
Yes. And the result was shitty speeds on state telecoms and extremely fast in the deregulated market.
How did they decide to name their Zoom/Teams replacement "Visio"?
There's already an extremely well known program called "Visio", namely Microsoft Visio, and it is included in many of the same Microsoft commercial office products that include Microsoft Teams. If you tell someone to switch from Microsoft Teams to Visio a lot of people will assume you mean Microsoft Visio and get rather confused.
I think this is one of the silver linings to this new era. By trying to renegotiate intolerable terms, the Americans are forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to make it all work without them. This will inevitably be a rough transition but it results in more worldwide resiliency and product/service options.
I think one question, which we might be seeing a bit here and there, is if the Americans decide that no, you can’t also do that. You must accept the intolerable terms or be punished.
Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.
Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…
Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.
France was one of the first to already adopt Matrix. However, when they began Visio, Element was embedding Jitsi for VoIP. Meanwhile Element built Element Call, which is somewhat similar to Visio (except E2EE and decentralised thanks to Matrix). Hopefully the two can converge :)
This is SO exciting to see!
One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world.
Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give.
So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there)
Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious.
Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.
Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment.
Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.
Look I am all for Euro-skepticism, but "boycotting the best products" on an article about Microsoft Teams which is well known to be clawing its way into companies despite very negative feedback due to advantageous pricing when you are integrated with Office 365 (which is itself monopolistic behavior). Is not one.
The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.
In no world are Teams and Zoom anywhere close to the "best products". They're awful, and only persist because of network effects or because of "the people who buy it don't feel the pain".
The best products like Microsoft Teams? Let's be honest, a lot of the software they've replaced has a checkered past
This is a great reason to invest in open-source software.
Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?
What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like?
I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley.
Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" operations? Create complementary tech ecosystems? Recruit Silicon Valley veterans and put them in charge, or just fire them after they get their tech?
Just look at how hard it is to come to a decision on something like allow Huawei to build a telephone network. Is it a good idea? Smart people say, Huawei should be allowed to provide the dumb pipes of the system, but not the high level stuff. Anything sensitive needs to be reviewed by domestic security services.
Is that the approach to America?
It seems like the article saying: "copy America's SaaS offerings." Not clear how that makes you digitally sovereign.
lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.
What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.
Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.
And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).
There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).
We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.
Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
>I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams.
Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.
It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.
The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.
But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.
Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
I’m well aware. (Probably any American who can name East Timor, let alone is aware of our participation in their genocide, is more likely than not to be familiar with our history.)
What you said doesn’t discount that we are better with free democracies, regardless of whether we see that through. Democracies tend to raise the per capita income across the population, which, in concert with free markets, gives our multinational corporations new markets to sell shit to.
Sometimes we have other more pressing concerns, like oil in Iran/Iraq (a democracy destroyed and created, respectively); global shipping / colonialism in our support of Israel in conflicts with Egypt over the Suez; abandoning our Kurdish allies to keep Turkey happy enough to keep military assets there.
Geopolitics doesn’t always do one thing or another, even if it were perfectly rational. And no foreign policy is that.
Yes, they do:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-...
People globally have routinely acknowledged that:
1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs
2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc.
3. This is good
The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.
France speaks for Europe? Heh heh heh...
France wants to really really reallllllyyyy believe they do.
Poland and Germany lets France say such fanciful words, but they keep their actual thoughts for themselves. They know France has an Adler inferiority complex, so they let them pretend.
This was always going to happen as soon as the USA decided to be overtly all about itself.
Tact and diplomacy meant that previously the USA was seen as, yes being all about itself, but not threateningly so when it came to its allies/friends. As soon as that veneer was removed the reaction was always going to be, "we'll look after ourselves then" - using the same tools China has (see: China having its own linux distribution)
Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?
Isn't it reasonable to block access to countries that deny you the option to compete and copy your business?
Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.
Should US businesses block all connections from countries which deny them the option to compete?
Does it matter whether a competitor in such a country is copying their business while they are denied the option to compete?
Just like Europeans, you need to understand international law. It's not law like law within a country. It's a warning. US software firms were never obligated to comply with anything. If you don't comply, you create an enemy. You comply based on your judgement of that enemies' ability, determination and level of creativity that they will use to punish you for noncompliance.
Do you want to do any business at all there? Do you have any vendors there? Do your owners own anything else that does business there? Do you have any investors that live there? Do your kids go to college there? Do you have to fly over or through it, ever?
It's leverage against leverage.
EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents.
The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.
[dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)
It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.
Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.
(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)
This one is often overlook but very good, I prefer it over Jitsi https://galene.org/
The French government built their own: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
"built their own" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product)
But you can see:
> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)
Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.
Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.
If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.
https://meet.proton.me should also be ready for action soon.
Imo this was inevitable even without Trump. He just massively accelerated it.
The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.
As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.
Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.
America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.
Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US.
Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Latest leaks indicate the US will be given sovereignty over its existing and future bases in Denmark, along with oil drilling rights, at $0 to US tax payers. Some vassal indeed.
> It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
They should all give me their passports. I want in.
Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc...
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive...
Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i...
> Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.
https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa...
> As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.
Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right...
A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...
Suprisingly the number does in fact seem to be roughly 80k per year, though a similar amount moved from Europe to the US.
https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/over-75000-americans-moved...
real source here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/migr_resfirst...
If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.
As an American, this is awesome to see.
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.