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European Alternatives

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291–300 of 526 posts

Re: European Alternatives

#291

What are some non-subjective reasons to use Euro alternatives? It reminds me of startup founders having to choose between the big expensive service or their buddy’s startup that intends to serve the same use case.

Here's one case from August 2025:

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Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.

All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.

"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.

He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...

Re: European Alternatives

#292

What are some non-subjective reasons to use Euro alternatives? It reminds me of startup founders having to choose between the big expensive service or their buddy’s startup that intends to serve the same use case.

> their buddy’s startup

That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.

Re: European Alternatives

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to be a customer of a company with extreme revenue? That only means you'll pay too much money.

Customers can benefit from scale too

Hmm, how starnge that AWS then seems to be the most expensive option around. I've saved loads of money by using Hetzner instead. I can also easily move to other providers should I want thanks to open standards and open source.

Re: European Alternatives

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're European and reading the news at any point in the last year+, you understand how critical a weakness being dependent on US companies for your IT infra is. There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.

Please don’t assume I’m not up to date on the news. But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software. I’m genuinely asking about incentives for the individual or individual business. That’s a more difficult question to answer than asking why shouldn’t Europe as a whole pursue this.

I answered above, but answering here as well in case it's buried.

> But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software.

Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc.

See this case of a French judge from 2025:

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...

Re: European Alternatives

#296
post #235
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if there are European resources to keep the lights on. Java is FOSS by the way, however it is also a good example, its runtime capabilities isn't the product of long nights and weekends.

> Java is FOSS by the way What was the problem between Android and Java then? Wasn't there some dispute between Google and Oracle on that? Genuinely interested.

Back then the licence did not apply to embedded systems, and Google did a Microsoft move as well, Android Java is their J++.

Sun did not sue, because they were out money already, and Oracle used the argument they were using Apache clone implementation of Java, with copyrighted headers.

To this day you cannot pick a random Java library and have it run on Android.

Even after having won, they refuse to implement full compatibility.

Re: European Alternatives

#297

One 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.

It merged with Mastercard almost two decades back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29

Re: European Alternatives

#298
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems. Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords? For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were seve…

A lot of European people spend their energy on those FOSS languages. Why would they go away? There's C++ if you want something that has an international standard.

Yes that would be one of them.

Re: European Alternatives

#299

Alternatives to Amazon.com? I'm totally serious when asking about this. I think delivery apps (like the one comically named "Deliveroo") are all potential alternatives to Amazon, but I think they charge a premium.

There's galaxus.com

Galaxus.eu, even.

Re: European Alternatives

#300
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.

No it's not. Wero is another name for iDEAL, it has been pushed by Dutch, but it is an engineering fiasco. There is no way Poland would adopt it. Blik is just on another level price- and feature-wise.

I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?

Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.

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