Does this hook up with promotion of the EUPL [1] as a preferred license for software? Does it even make more sense for european FOSS authors over the GPL family?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
European Alternatives
171–180 of 526 posts
Re: European Alternatives
#172This is nice but if Europe doesn't fix their tech salaries situation (half US' in most cases, if not lower), I don't think it's sustainable.
The higher US salaries are a bug, not a feature, in this context.
Re: European Alternatives
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
It’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
Re: European Alternatives
#174One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
Re: European Alternatives
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc.
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
Re: European Alternatives
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction. Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain. I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is…
Hmm, I wouldn't say it would take a "massive" amount of capital. EU is rich enough and they don't pay developers as well, correct? Most of the building blocks already exist.
Yes, but integrating them seamlessly and securely is still a huge undertaking.
Re: European Alternatives
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually. Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they…
For the same reason people on the wrong countries aren't allowed to contribute to US projects. The way things are going it becomes a national security issue where those PR are coming from.
So, to be clear, your reasons for looking for EU alternatives (i.e. that "same reason" you refer to) is that some countries are not allowed to contribute to US projects?
Re: European Alternatives
#178This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc. The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level. So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much…
> EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen". I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.
You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.
Re: European Alternatives
#179Last time this came up I decided to try Scaleway which is at the top of their "cloud computing" list. "European alternative" that doesn't know that European addresses have non-ASCII characters: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this. It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first. A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
Re: European Alternatives
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Graham lives in UK.
That doesn't make Hacker News European. It is American. Y Combinator is American even if pg is originally British. Stripe is American but its founders are Irish.
Yeah i know, my response was a clarification that BenoitEssiambre was referring to the founder, not the site itself. My interpretation of the "so there's that" part of the message, was an acknowledgement that Hacker News is hosted in US, but if nothing else the founder is living in UK.