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

politico.eu

101–110 of 507 posts

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

#101
post #69

Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing" manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence overall as orgs.

competence at what, exactly?

At building great software. While America struggles to build one mile of subway, Europe struggles to write one line of code.

There are exceptions (I'm partial to Jetbrains) but it's true overall.

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

#102
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general i…

The problem is not retaining talent. People doesn't just migrate in mass to the USA. The problem is how easy is to create a company, raise funds and get the needed licenses.

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

#103
post #57
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

Also see Quaero

Right, that was pathetic. IIRC they burnt 400 million € without producing any tangible results.

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

#104
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general i…

> How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon?

Because of us government funding which created silicon valley. Silicon Valley itself is pretty much a DoD project. The foundation of the internet and many of these companies were laid by government - direct spending, subsidies, tax breaks and in amazon's case, legal protection ( they didn't have to collect state taxes ) until fairly recently.

> A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts.

This is silicon valley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(pre-19...

> But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?

Many of the VCs had indirect government ties. But that's besides the point. Amazon/Google doesn't exist without silicon valley which the government created, government subsidies and government protection.

And this isn't including the government's role in keeping international markets open to google/amazon/etc. Notice how there wasn't much pushback from most countries while google/amazon gobbled up entire countries? Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.

> Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?

Considering american tech companies own the european market why wouldn't american developers get higher pay? If europeans protected their market and european tech companies take over the european market, tech pay would inevitably rise.

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

#105
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

> French X for any X

OCaml is the French SML ;)

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

#106
post #89
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation. It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom. What I don't unders…

> there are very capable and smart engineers in France

I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general i…

I.e. Germany has: * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap. Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government…

Yes, the DoD is behind a lot of stuff but they seem to get it right, unlike most EU countries with gov funded programs that are an absolute disaster.

EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US.

So we waster money and we basically burn it without any positive outcome.

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

#108
post #47

I get the sentiment, but why not invest in companies like https://www.scaleway.com/en/ a bit more?

How does Scaleway compare to OVH?

Personally, I've not used OVH, so I cannot judge. But here is how I would rate Scaleway.

Pros:

- They are really really cheap! This is not just for the VMs themselves, but their VMs come with NVMe disks and comes with uncapped networking

- Their customer support has been phenomenonal, and this was when I was on their free tier support

Cons:

- They are only limited to 2 regions, Paris and Netherlands

- I've seen their VMs become out of stock quite often

Personally though, their pros far outweigh their cons, so I would very much love to see them expand their service.

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

#109
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

The Qwant story is even worse than this, the level of cronyism and ineptitude, the extreme turnover of engineers, the lies from well connected french oligarchy hustlers...

Is there any place where I can read a bit about their history?

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

#110
post #97
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. 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…

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especiall…

France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.
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