Comment by pjmlp
1 month ago
Categories missing:
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
1 month ago
Categories missing:
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?
Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.
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 has FOSS implementations. Oracle is very much NOT free: https://oraclejavalicensing.com/who-needs-an-oracle-java-lic...
To the extent that my employer blocks Oracle dot com at the outbound firewall to stop anyone accidentally incurring license costs. You don't want to deal with Oracle license enforcement.
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Keeping the lights on is sufficient for the immediate concerns.
We can worry about feature growth later, if at all. It may be age finally changing my preferences, but so much of what I've seen sold as "new" in tech in recent years has been either worse than what I already had or a reinvention of something that already existed. Like, contactless payments were already a thing before they were available in phones, and social media didn't start with FB and twitter, and Apple's API updates in the last few years feel like as much of a downgrade to me as their icons seem to be to UI blogs.
> 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.
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I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
Hardware vendors is a different issue
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 several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
People are still running on Java 1.8, which was released in 2014. If no more Java work happened, that'd be unfortunate, but realistically we'd all be fine.
For the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be?
On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
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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.
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The EU is asking for information on how to support open source, as they currently do through NLNET. It seems to prefer decentralised open source to the hyper-capitalism we got from American tech. Both have their downsides, of course.
They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register
Thanks
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
Where are located the key companies that contribute to Linux ecosystem?
They do not dominate the development Like MS for Windows. Independent people from all over the world review their contribution. This is a small problem related to other things.
Also, Qubes OS exists.
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 are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.
> why you are looking for an EU alternative
I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.
So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.
But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
Yeah i understand why one would do that, i wrote that not to make the question itself, but to indicate that whoever thinks to look for EU alternatives should ask that question to themselves. This way they can figure out how to choose their next steps, like judging if a FLOSS project makes sense to use or avoid - e.g. if it is tied in a US company.
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?
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For consumers, these computers look interesting: https://starlabs.systems/
I recently discovered these: https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/
- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.
Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.
Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
European cloud sovereignty starts with European hardware. Without European bare-metal, the rest is just branding.