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

politico.eu

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

#431

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

gspr wrote: post #181
heipei wrote: post #164

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or wa…

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate th…

I find this interesting, but which South are you referring to? Southern Europe or Southern US?

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

#432

Post by drstewart »

Bayart wrote: post #214
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Salaries have diminishing returns too. If you balance income and quality of life, if you can reach a certain point that's reasonable for you, it doesn't make sense at all to go through the trouble of moving. Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.

>Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.

Too bad none of the immigration numbers bear this out.

Friendly reminder that what you prefer does not necessarily generalize.

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

#433

Post by Pedrit0 »

Udik wrote: post #397
Pedrit0 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same for the web, for the mobile, and for many other sectors. We seem to be always late on the market, why is it so? 1.We lost the WWII. The US won it and took the leadership of the world. At a moment we were rebuilding our continent, they developed very quickly and took a competitive advantage in many sectors. We managed to catch-up in some but not in others. And since the beginning IT has always been an American…

> And since the beginning IT has always been an American thing > apart Minitel in France in the 80's > Thomson, Siemens or Olivetti. > I think mobile developed first in Europe (Nokia ?) Yep. And let's not forget that the www was invented by an Englishman in Geneva. So how come we seem to be losing all the battles in the end? I agree that there's geopolitical explanations too: another commenter mentioned that the petr…

> So how come we seem to be losing all the battles in the end?

Vast question, and apart the geopolitical reasons, I could not say why we are unable to develop in specific sectors such as IT. I could not speak about whole Europe, but France, my country has serious issues with transforming a tech success into an economic success. If you take this Minitel story for example : the US would have made it a worlwide success 15 years before Internet emerged with hundred of billions of profits. In France it was distributed almost freely to families by the state owned phone company. So it became a booster to the national economy but not much more than that. It never became a standard, never went out of France and never allowed us to become an early IT champion... We simply have different mindsets. But I think that other European countries are far better than us in this domain.

> While in France you have judges ordering (shamelessly, in my view) that Google both has to do a certain job and pay for the privilege of doing it.

Again this is geopolitics. In France Google is perceived as a dangerous company for our European interest. MOreover like other US tech companies, they cheat to avoid their tax duty in France, which infuriates many people. So all the actions intended against Google are part of a dirty war. These actions are undoubtly unfair. But do not forget Google actively lobbies against our governements at the EU level, try to prevent us from passing laws to regulate our data privacy issues, help the US agencies to spy on us... They are not our friends.

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

#434

Post by Pedrit0 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #398
Udik wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They created the Cloud and we arrived late on this market Same for the web, for the mobile, and for many other sectors. We seem to be always late on the market, why is it so? > All defense/sensitive/state owned companies, administration and maybe banking companies will not have the choice Ok, so if I understand it correctly the EU is going to regulate out from some sectors non-EU companies and has to both come up w…

> Same for the web, for the mobile, and for many other sectors. We seem to be always late on the market, why is it so? From what I have seen it is because of an "ask for permission culture" as a norm. The French show up the most in news stories with "felony interference with a business model" stories. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/08/07/158371114/ou... Say what you will about its role in food but it isn't…

> The French show up the most in news stories with "felony interference with a business model" stories.

I agree with you. And am French. But France is not whole Europe.

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

#435

Post by Pedrit0 »

Udik wrote: post #391
Pedrit0 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are the things we need to copy- not the technology. This is only my own subjective opinion: the worst thing that we could copy from the US is their business mindset. It destroys society, states, fair competition, and at the end the core values of capitalism. Their mindset gave them leadership but now is about to destroy their society. We have to find our own path.

I agree up to a point. I do think as well that there are the downsides you mentioned to the US business and social culture. But at the same time it produces a clear supremacy in a lot of sectors. We might be able to find a sweet European middle ground, but we need to start with the idea of learning from others, and learning is always a changing process. And I don't think that declaring your pride and love for who you…

> "And I don't think that declaring your pride and love for who you are is a good starting point for any kind of change."

Lol. American do it constantly and it works for them.

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

#436

Post by oneplane »

> " a platform joining up cloud-hosting services from dozens of companies, allowing business to move their data freely"

This is practically dead before it's created. The other platforms (AWS, GCP etc.) are hyperscale due to their useful integrated nature of building blocks. You're not going to get that with a bunch of random vendors. It's hard enough as it is for a large company to create a somewhat homogenous environment, and existing projects that are supposed to be multi-vendor like OpenStack (and CloudStack) are just not on par.

Say you have a few vendors, one runs VMWare, one runs Hyper-V, and you need a workload with scalable counts of CPUs, and the datacenter of the VMWare guys is full and you now need to use some of the CPUs in the other datacenter. Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower layers resolve it? Probably not.

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

#437

Post by gspr »

ardy42 wrote: post #415
gspr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate th…

> Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

> I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to stuff like this in GP's comment:

> Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home!

I personally love human interactions, but the idea that I'd have to call Joe in sales to spin up a VM for a few hours is ludicrous. Likewise for a lot of routine mundane stuff that is easily automatable. I think the world will be poorer if we move humans out of our daily interactions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to gain by moving the humans to where they can what they do best - namely be human!

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

#438

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

mandevil wrote: post #289
4636760295 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter point, I have seen technology adopted in the EU in ways that the US has lagged far, far behind. Probably the best example of this is chip & PIN for credit cards. In the US we finally have chips, but still no PIN.

Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? I don't know the exact details on credit cards, but I know that's true for CDMA vs. GSM and NTSC vs PAL. In the US there were so many black and white TV's already out there that they couldn't abandon them, hence NTSC (which allowed the older blac…

Ahem. No. At the end of the day PAL worked the same way. I know because we had a small black & white TV-Set when i was very little. And been mostly disinterested in it, because playing in the surrounding forests with my friends was more exiting, even for them, who already had colour TV.

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

#439

Post by narag »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #187
narag wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>People doesn't just migrate in mass to the USA. Pretty sure the strict and difficult process of getting a working visa has something to do with that as well, not just that not everyone on the planet is interested in migrating.

Indeed. That and more considerations like leaving behind your family, friends, love interests. Or the language, culture, food.

Salaries in some of our neighbours like Germany are much higher and still only a small percent of the talented people move there.

Money is an incentive for sure. But it's not an absolute factor.

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

#440

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

thamer wrote: 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…

I sometimes use Qwant from Germany.
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