Comment by quadrifoliate

Comment by quadrifoliate 10 hours ago

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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.

Barrin92 10 hours ago

>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.

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  • quadrifoliate 9 hours ago

    > 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".

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    • palata 8 hours ago

      > 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

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      • simplyluke 7 hours ago

        "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.

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    • ajcp 6 hours ago

      -> 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.

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    • sirwitti 9 hours ago

      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.

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      • scottyah 6 hours ago

        Signal is also USA developed and funded, not sure why you're bringing that up?

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    • Barrin92 7 hours ago

      >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.

      [1]https://solidproject.org

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palata 9 hours ago

The US government has been working really hard on making sure that nobody can compete with the US Big Tech. See what Cory Doctorow has to say about this, for instance.

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gib444 10 hours ago

> 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

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  • quadrifoliate 9 hours ago

    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.

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  • frumplestlatz 9 hours ago

    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?

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anon291 10 hours ago

OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.

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  • antirez 10 hours ago

    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.

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    • quadrifoliate 10 hours ago

      > 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.

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    • anon291 10 hours ago

      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.

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      • bigyabai 10 hours ago

        > 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.

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  • Bengalilol 8 hours ago

    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...>

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    • anon291 2 hours ago

      The issue with these 'international'forums is that it's basically European countries tanking itself.

      There's a meme going around online where it says "the world condemns..." On top and then a map of the globe with Europe and America highlighted.

      Europe's issue is that it only considers itself.

      Lithuania.. guys come on. And the Netherlands is not even in your list showing how ridiculous this entire thing is. As it goes most European lists of self congratulations are just moral rankings by their own standards

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  • maelito 10 hours ago

    The problem is not ownership. It's dev force. We're not bad here in europe, not bad at all.

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    • anon291 2 hours ago

      Do you make your own chips that are competitive with anyone? All the chip makers are american and Chinese.

      Love him or hate him, Trump's tsmc deals mean America can design and manufacture chips in some quantity

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  • meinersbur 10 hours ago

    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, ...)

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