Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 80 posts

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#61

Post by incomingpain »

Mossy9 wrote: post #41
incomingpain wrote: post #37

Microsoft either has a good product that is wanted or it doesnt and was anticompetitive. cough cough. The EU absolutely should try to stand up their own tech infrastructure. Entire supply chain. chips, software, everything. Absolutely needs to happen eventually. The problem with the EU is singlular; there has been loads of anti-microsoft folks attempting to beat them for basically forever. Unsuccessfully. They dont h…

I'm very hopeful that https://www.euro-stack.info will not be a pipe dream, but actually produces results

Realistically I look at that and think there's not a snowballs chance in hell that the EU is going to accomplish that. Not even in 100 years. Not without major regulation changes anyway.

Mind you, they absolutely do need to, so get started right away.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#62

Post by ta1243 »

Delphiza wrote: post #6

While governments may be interested in moving stuff off Azure/AWS/GCP, in my experience, most businesses don't care enough. It is difficult enough to get them to spend money on the bare minimum needed for security. Yes, they will want 'sovereign data' because it looks good on the annual report, but most would not do it for double the cost. Europe and other parts of the world should reduce their dependency on American…

European tarrifs on AWS/Azure/GCP would be an option. European tech companies expanding into SAAS is less of a mountain than physical production.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#63

Post by ta1243 »

philipallstar wrote: post #2

I think this is long overdue, just like Europe's sudden investment in militaries to pull its weight in global defence. More competition is better.

Europe has tried this in the past and the US has vetoed it. The dirty secret is America wants Europe to spend more money with American companies, not just spend more on defence. America would rather 80% of a 100b defence industry than 20% of a 300b defence industry, both from a financial point of view and from a strategic point of view.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#64

Post by pabs3 »

apatheticonion wrote: post #56
edhelas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do https://nlnet.nl/core/ with https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092990

What they already contribute is amazing, honestly. My concern is that, in order to build a genuine competitor to Windows, investment needs to increase substantially. As it stands, getting into kernel development or working on something like a desktop environment (or adjacent software like Firefox or Chromium) is quite difficult in a way that supports you financially. I mean, as individuals, we still invest personal t…

The way Linux kernel stuff works, is you do a Linux internship with GSoC or Outreachy or LKMP , and then core Linux contributing companies like Intel, AMD etc gobble you up. Or you join FOSS consultancies Like Igalia, Bootlin, Collabora etc. Or you go the rockstar Patreon way like Asahi folks, trading off money for independence.

https://lwn.net/Articles/997959/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Igalia is probably the best option for getting into core browser/etc work, they are hiring for WebKit/Chromium and are also working on Servo.

https://www.igalia.com/jobs/open/

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#65

Post by graemep »

cruzcampo wrote: post #60
graemep wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines. I would prefer that, but the GP was asking what a startup should try to do, and I think trying to get people to go back to using their own machines would be an additional barrier.

I do wonder if building software that runs on your own machine would be a market advantage in the EU. One could market strongly with the data privacy / sovereignty angle that resonates a lot more in Europe than the US.

Maybe with tech people, but non-tech management and consumers do not care in my experience.

I think its partly a cultural change with regard to privacy and partly learned helplessness.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#66

Post by graemep »

jajko wrote: post #54
graemep wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two different questions. From a public interest point of view I would say AWS, GCP and Azure From the likelihood of a business being successful probably less well entrenched services, and ones politicians understand - so probably things directly used by consumers and very visible. Probably SaaS of some kind. Also, its not just the EU (which is what the article is about). Non EU European countries, and the rest of the…

This could be the ultimate push to open source, pushed by most if not all non-US governments globally. As for services/products - cloud and MS. From MS - Active directory, Exchange, Outlook, Word, Excel and probably Powerpoint in no particular order. The key is not to have something basic cca working, we have those for decades and they are pretty fringe. Walking the last mile, the hardest part of smoothing integratio…

The integration might be the best real reason, but IMO the real reason is branding and good marketing.

A lot of FOSS and other non-US software has at least as good UI and often better responsiveness.

However for many people particular apps they need are Windows only. Lots of industry vertical stuff.

With regard to marketing and branding, a lot of people use AWS because of the brand. Its not a particularly good provider of VPSs but I have lost count of how many people use AWS as a VPS provider (not using other services) and even worse most of them buy and instance plus storage rather than saving money by using Lightsail. I have had people argue that potential acquirers might be put off by using smaller providers.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#67

Post by LadyCailin »

whazor wrote: post #16
pjc50 wrote: post #3

> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else." Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue. Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon trans…

Looking at Microsoft's proposal, it looks like the sovereign data centers will be ran by non-Microsoft owned European companies? But the software would be from Microsoft. I wonder how much difference would there be between a European company running a DC or Microsoft running a DC under a Microsoft European entity. Windows itself has had backdoors via viruses. But even the Linux kernel has been vulnerable in the past…

Azure is provided by 21vianet in China, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21Vianet and is only accessible to people in China (maybe there are more requirements too, like security clearances, etc) but folks in Redmond can’t get direct access to these servers, even the ones running only Microsoft software - they have to get an escort, and tell the escort what to do for them. They can only see the screen, so long as the escort allows it.

So I imaging there’s no reason this same approach can’t have done in Europe, and Microsoft already has development centers all over Europe, so they already have the necessary employees to run this, to some degree anyways.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#68

Post by pabs3 »

pjc50 wrote: post #3

> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else." Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue. Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon trans…

I'd say that a sovereign cloud is an oxymoron; anything that is "other people's computers" in any sense, is not sovereign.

The trade war shows that "sovereign" computing is a spectrum, and to be fully sovereign you need to be able to create everything yourself, from end user software, through services, operating systems, bootloaders, firmware, programming languages, datacentres, network, board layouts, processor designs, board assembly, processor fabs, processing rare earth minerals, mining ore etc, plus everything you need to do that.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#69

Post by pabs3 »

cruzcampo wrote: post #21

What would said tech independence actually take? Which American services would be highest priority to replace? In other words, if I were an EU startup, who should I compete with/try to clone?

Enforce separation of layers through interoperability. Each layer of the tech stack should be easy for someone to swap out (or even choose at first use). The mainboard, the processor, the RAM, the disk, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS, the apps, the each layer of the network services etc.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#70

Post by pabs3 »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #4

Anyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem a…

Europe would probably be more interested in sovereign computing; open source with on-premises computers.
Post reply on HN