Comment by impossiblefork
1 year ago
Yes, but what if the big-software type economy isn't actually that useful?
Maybe you can grow it to 30% of GDP if you start doing a bunch of bad stuff, but if it can be replaced by open source local stuff-- if it's possible to simply kill facebook, Microsoft etc. and replace them with Linux together with a couple of not incredibly expensive software packages developed to provide a substitute, then why should we have a big-software economy?
I think this is more the idea. The interesting thing isn't to build a European Facebook or an EU SaaS economy, it's to kill the whole concept, globally.
> Maybe you can grow it to 30% of GDP if you start doing a bunch of bad stuff, but if it can be replaced by open source local stuff-- if it's possible to simply kill facebook, Microsoft etc. and replace them with Linux together with a couple of not incredibly expensive software packages developed to provide a substitute, then why should we have a big-software economy?
People have been saying this for twenty or thirty years, and in the meantime the economy has coalesced further into fewer American megacorps. It's a mirage. Things do not work that way.
(AI is going to be exactly the same: the huge corporate valuations are predicated on there being exactly one big AI company which takes a significant chunk of value from all word-based work being done today)
All this happening in the US due the lack of good anti-monopoly regulations.
This is by design. US government isn't gonna kneecap it's most valuable companies now, since they're also monopolizing the international tech markets including the European one, and as long as China isn't taming its own monopolistic giants, then the US has no incentive to do it to themselves considering the economic war they're in now.
The US government threw the book at Microsoft in the 90s when tech was a small slice of the US GDP and it had no international competition, but today the tech sector is the biggest engine of GDP growth in the US, so there's no way the US government is gonna throw a spanner in that just to be richeous.
In the current economic and political climate, having a monopoly on monopolistic giants like the US does, is much better than having no monopolistic giants like the EU, since nice guys do indeed finish last.
Exactly, enshittification is creeping everywhere, EU should not follow a model that is breaking up in front of us.
I 100% agree.
A European FB or alternatives for literally every US Big Tech product already exist, all of them OSS.
Even search (Google) now became much easier to replace with LLMs.
What it misses is solving the chicken and egg problem, basically getting people to use it.
Without its people, social networks are useless. The same is search.
Firstly, Linux isn't made for free by hobbyists. The biggest contributors are profitable, largely American tech companies. Intel, AMD, even Microsoft is now a contributor.
Secondly, the idea that you can just replace the entire software industry with Linux is... Are there even words to describe this? Linux is just an operating system. You can't replace a whole industry with "a couple of cheap packages."
I'm not saying that you can replace the entire software industry by Linux, but you can replace Windows with Linux, you can build simple locally run software to replace many of the well-known services, you can put some efforts into creating local clones with greater adaptability to match the biggest SaaS services, etc.
Basically, to go after the easy 90%. Then we go from a world with data in the cloud, massive advertisement statistics gathering etc., to a world where people mostly use computers to solve concrete physical problems in their environment and where networks are distributed, e-mail like or like a facebook where every participant stores a substantial amount of information locally in plaintext and has it interpreted by a desktop app, where he has no feed with the content decided by others, but chooses what he has the computer show him, etc.
Just look at telecom. How much complexity in the protocols isn't there just because people have to have their resource usage monitored so they can be billed for it, and for this to be settled between telecom companies?
The software to kill SaaS and Facebook might be so simple that a couple of people could write it by themselves. It's like that local government 'if you have regional govt they decide it all in Nottingham probably in a couple of meetings. Complete amateurs.' That's where I think we could go, but with software instead of the UK civil service.
It also fits really with with the coming of LLMs etc. You can just store of a lot stuff in plain text and have this super-fast reader process it all. Instead of lots of software, just huge amounts of plaintext that the machine can understand.
> The software to kill SaaS and Facebook might be so simple that a couple of people could write it by themselves
Today's version of the HN classic "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" (on the launch of the original iPod)
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The US forcing all government agencies to use open source software would save taxpayers money. Additionally — in tandem with other countries following suit — the policy would create the incentive for governments to contribute to OS development, and thus, the OS community would not need to rely so heavily on industry for Linux development, dismantling your implication that OS software is contingent on big-tech’s existence.
Switzerland already has a policy that all government agencies need to use open source software so the policy I mention isn’t a pie-in-the-sky theoretical.
You can easily replace simple apps like Facebook, WhatsApp or Snapchat with a couple of cheap packages.
Somebody remember elgg? Or buddypress? None of these mega cooperations have software that can't easily be copied.
You might be right.
The US might always dominate software (which could turn out to have no moat) and China might always dominate manufacturing.
But neither industrialized manufacturing or software even existed 200 years ago. I'm pretty sure we haven't hit the final destination in human history where there's no problems left to solve.
There's this one weird "AI" thing people are talking about. Could be something people find useful you could work on?
Germany has a big-nothing economy right now. Compared to that, even a small-software economy is useful. Germany can't live on everyone else's money indefinitely, at some point everyone else is going to get fed up that they have to be paying more tax and higher energy prices because Germany can't sustain itself.
You should read up before making grandiose statements like that. Totally not true. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/01/30/c...
A theoretical recovery is not an actual recovery, and if history has any lessons, then it's quite unlikely that Germany could economically recover without more US money, which is not coming.
What?
They literally build machines that everybody needs to live. They make everything, all sorts of little of bits you need. If you need a special chemical reactor that resists some weird thing, it's probably from Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_(2022%E...
Indeed. Zeiss lenses. Medical equipment. Boss. Siemens. The only thing that's really lacking is ict and ai. But that can be fixed
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