561–570 of 621 posts
I don't think the main thing stopping an EU Zooms or Teams from capturing the market is not enough help from the French government.
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> in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin Would you elaborate how this "in fact" is "protecting their citizens' rights"? Very curious to know.
Microsoft, Google, et al very famously spy on everything you do and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government, regardless of whether the person is a US citizen. Take this idea one step further. Microsoft, Google, et al also snoop on what foreign governments do with their software and report back to USGov.
Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.
Don’t think that this is a uniquely American property. If your data sits on servers within the control of any company that operates in a country, that country can and will apply legal pressure upon those companies to extract the data.
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Yup, DINUM does support the Matrix Foundation, which is appreciated in terms of helping keeping Matrix itself alive and independent. However, this doesn't help support the folks improving & maintaining Element (either its clients or servers), which is the actual upstream product that Tchap is dependent on. Just like donating to the W3C doesn't help improve Firefox, if you were operationally dependent on a Firefox for…
I think it's a very convenient way of framing it and nicely occults how the stewardship at Matrix significantly changed since they chose it for Tchap.
We’re just stating facts: DINUM stopped funding upstream development at Element in 2022/2023 when their post-COVID funding evaporated, and this then directly contributed to the licensing changes at Element at the end of 2023 (https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/) as we tried to figure out a way to survive (which, thankfully, worked).
But we also know that the Tchap team is very budget constrained internally themselves to keep it running, despite the growing criticality and huge visibility of the service, and are trying to find ways to fix the situation at every level.
This is not a challenge limited to France: the question of how to support the upstream when heavily using open source was one of the top topics of last week’s Open Source Week in Brussels, involving folks at every level in European government.
This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population. I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to grad…
Now compound that issue with conservative investors, a fractured "single" market and a strong preference for social equality over entrepreneurship.
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Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US. Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025. As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc... https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive... Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, w…
Even after all of that... I'd still live in Europe any day of the week instead of your sh1thole country. How's your gestapo crackdown going? Your nation is currently as stain on democratic landscape. I hope you move beyond it.
You're welcome.
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Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US. There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay b…
I don't think capital is that much of a problem. We have it, and it's been growing consistently. What we lack is risk appetite, young people dreaming to be entrepreneurs, talent, a truly unified market, regulations and proper corporate law. Say what you want but stock options essentially don't exist in Europe, so you either give equity upfront or you don't at all.
The capital is locked up in traditional large multinationals. I've watched them launch one boondoggle after another. And it fail because of endless meetings and fearing to know their customers.
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Among software developers, the vast majority does.
definitely not at a native level...
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I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure. Grist https:…
Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration. That b…
I don't think it's just that. It's also the increasingly plausible idea that the US government could pressure the EU by actually or threatening to control, throttle or tax EU access to online platforms such as Zoom, Teams, MS Office, Google docs, Azure or AWS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft, Google, et al very famously spy on everything you do and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government, regardless of whether the person is a US citizen. Take this idea one step further. Microsoft, Google, et al also snoop on what foreign governments do with their software and report back to USGov.
> and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government, Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases. Don’t think that this is a uniquely American property. If your data sits on servers within the control of any company that operates in a country, that country can and will apply legal pressure upon those companies to extract the data.
I'm not sure of your point. This is an excellent argument as to why the French government should run their government videoconferencing and chat on infrastructure in France, as they plan to do, isn't it? Using software that they have vetted. Regardless of if this is a "uniquely American" thing or not.