Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it.

The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.

It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.

Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...

That said, I don’t think I have ever heard of governments releasing copyrighted, closed-source software, let alone trying to make money off it. That just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any reason why the lack of a profit motive would be a detriment to competition in the event governments do invest in free software

Honestly this seems like something a trade treaty would be useful for if it weren’t written by multinational corporations. Until then we’re gonna be stuck with really, really shitty decisions as individuals, like ios vs android.

Hell, have you seen any competition in software in private markets? There’s isolated pockets of competition in certain circumstances, but from my perspective the major markets all colluded to fuck us roughly the same ways.

That said, this effort will fail for lack of decent hardware investment to keep costs down.