Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
There is no unringing this bell. Maybe a sane administration would slow the migration, but the damage is done. America is a capricious partner who can flip the table at any moment.
The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them.
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
> isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want?
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
What a joke of a comment. Trump and Musk and Vance explicitly support every anti-EU party in a half-dozen EU countries. Cuz they wanna make EU stronger, durrr.
> In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
US perspective: EU looks like a great place to expand into once I've reached some critical size threshold. But I can't imagine starting a business there. In the US we have effectively limitless capital, tons of tech talent, and many fewer regulations.
Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
On the other hand, I could never imagine moving to the US. It seems like such a third world country in so many ways. The amount of households that cant afford a sudden $400 expense without borrowing. The childhood poverty rates. The maternal mortality rate. The traffic deaths (en even worse, the pedestrian traffic deaths going in the wrong direction fast), people dying at work, the fact that you managed to get hookworm BACK, the power grid (I love in a small society in Sweden and I have averages 6 minutes of power outages per year), people being functionally illiterate.
I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.
> Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
Sounds like you're doing some shady, disgusting bullshit or you're exaggerating the regulations. I hope it's the latter.
For sure. But a major goal of US foreign policy was to create an EU so it would be easier for trade. Backsliding on support, wanting to sabotage it, doesn’t help US companies as it just adds burden.
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
> Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There
are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
There are plenty of viable alternatives. Perhaps not all are as polished as some of the mainstay US companies, but the funtionality is there. It's no surprise that people in the US are ignorant of the existence of the many excellent EU software companies and services.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
>There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
China: Everything that puts western buyers off Chinese stuff, same happens in reverse. E.g. translation is really really hard. Every previous time I have illustrated how bad Google Translate is at this by quoting the Chinese output, someone has missed the point and replied to tell me the output is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible.
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
An insider view: there is a major push in a lot of state related team & department at the moment to go “sovereign tooling”. With alternatives for a lot of stuff.
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.
EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
In the tech sector, EU has been a colony of pretty much every other country which it used to colonize. IMO, the fines that the EU used to collect regularly from US big tech companies were bribes to keep suppressing the EU tech sector.
What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Idk, VLC is kinda everywhere and while not the super cutting edge of video playing anymore, is still pretty OK. If they'd just attach a chat and SIP client to VLC they'd be set.
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards!
Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
The reflex to bind Europe's IT with OSS is due to several factors, like Linus Torvalds being Finnish, Arch and SUSE having a European leadership, NEXT and OpenCloud started by German hands and an absence of a unicorn IT company in EU.
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change
it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
French report:
The project presented is not new; it is a continuation of the Tixeo project (https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions... video-conferencing-service-tixeocloud/trial-tixeocloud/), which was already the recommended solution for French government officials, public companies and all large companies required to process confidential or classified data via video conferencing.
Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.).
The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications.
I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite.
French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
I have also seen situations where sales opted into Microsoft early on. When they grew in relation to engineering forced the rest of the company to standardize to Microsoft products so they could get better rates and “save money”.
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
You're delusional if you think people willingly use half of these products, remove the billions spent on lobbyism and these things will evaporate in 5 years tops
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
> it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want
That's a category error. It's a social construction, a thing that emerges from the interactions of many humans. "We", an authority nominally working for the citizens, can shape it by using the law, a blunt instrument. It's like how you can shape the development of a musician by using threats and a baseball bat.
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
It will mean little if the infrastructure is still dependent on volatile partners (and I'm bundling allies and adversaries in this).
The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...).
Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities.
And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so.
The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.
Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.
I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
The EU commission would be in an interesting position to mandate American platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, etc...) to support interoperability in order to avoid "market distortion".
Meaning the US based companies would bear _some_ of the burden of making it easier to ditch them, and switch to "sovereign" solutions.
The rest of the world would have a vested interest in letting this happen, since it would also reduce _their_ dependence on the US.
The question then becomes "what happens first":
1 - European commission pressuring the Irish government to send its police to seize AWS servers in Dublin (when fines are not enough any more)
2 - US administration pressuring the tech companies to shut down service in Europe (when threats are not enough any more)
Outscale is kind of the stereotypical bureaucratic French thing. It's made by Dassault, that's better known for industrial stuff (like SolidWorks), not for modern-ish software.
For a more of an AWS replacement, look at Scaleway. It really is more what we think about when talking "public cloud": self-serve compute, with lots of managed services, actual API and Terraform, actual K8s, etc. (managed services is why I don't mention OVH, which is often touted as a "cloud provider", yet lacks a large managed services offering).
For all these there are protocols that could allow interoperability in-between offers, EU policy makers seem to be aware of the issue given what was mandated to Whatsapp. Let's hope for the best outcome!
France’s govt can probably mandate adoption in the guise of national security (which would be true tbh) and with the current rhetoric their people will be welcoming of it. It’ll probably suck but the tradeoffs could be worth it, not too unlike rationing during WW2 times. And I’m sure there are a lot of engineers and companies looking forward to getting that sweet govt contracts.
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment.
Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
That's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones.
In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less.
But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best.
Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU.
Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".
I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.
They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth.
> It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.
- Tchap is a message app for officials,
- Visio, based on LiveKit
- FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it.
- Fichiers => Drive
- Messagerie => Email
- Docs => A better Google Docs
- Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
It might be worth considering that if those are intro classes, then it's not like they can't be easily replaced: it's not like the audience is wedded to any of those at an introductory level.
Until now nobody thought it was a problem.
At least not a big one.
The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
The cost to bootstrap a sovereign cloud offering in Europe that can even begin to compare to the big ones in the US would be humongous. There would need to be a solid, multi-year incentive for a company/startup to even want to attempt it. It has to come from the top. Else force the big US clouds operating in Europe to be ready to effectively detach from their US counterparts if shit hits the fan, though this one's probably not realistic.
I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.
You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
The problem I've seen with this is that Wero works with banking applications that require either Google Play or App Store. Which means that you may not need an American company for the payment itself, but you now need an American company in the device you have to use for the payment.
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
Yeah, I remember reading about an article on France govt adopting element/matrix. Surprised it didn´t go mainstream in other departments/companies/people.
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.
And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
the Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return.
as it was, so shall it always be.
any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.
US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
Honestly the greatest thing trump did is help us, French, and maybe Europeans, to get back our sovereignty.
I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it.
Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too.
Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending.
For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
I live and work in Germany and know many people across Europe. Admittedly more in Western Europe, and admittedly my bubble leans toward traditional industries.
I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action.
Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
Same. French here. I can't stand hearing these words anymore, when at the same time I read that the French intelligence services closed a 5-year deal with Palantir.
Well, my company is! I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS with Volumes. It's a small step, but it works for us and it is way cheaper!
The US has already employed its technology and financial instruments, including sanctions, to coerce and control its partners. Sanctioning an ICC prosecutor and subsequently restricting Microsoft’s access to his emails and documents are just a few instances of this. They have demonstrated their willingness to use their technology, financial instruments, and sanctions against their partners. It seems almost too late for Europe to achieve its independence in both technological and financial spheres.
I pulled all my servers from the US months ago. Everyone I talk to is doing the same. Tech giants are going to feel this, especially when the AI bubble is going to burst.
I wish I could cancel my Office subscription but my kids still need it for school. I wrote them to take a hard look at that requirement.
I’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense.
I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
Silicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world).
And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
It's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The
"Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this.
The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
I've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.
Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties.
And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects.
Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
This is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves.
So a huge waste of taxpayers money...
This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
Don't take the Canadian market for granted.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
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It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
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Canada is subject to the Monroe doctrine. Forge a link too close and there will be intervention of sorts.
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Not only software. Think back to who supplied the vaccines during COVID.
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> weaponized against us
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
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But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
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At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
There is no unringing this bell. Maybe a sane administration would slow the migration, but the damage is done. America is a capricious partner who can flip the table at any moment.
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The day I heard trump wants to fire Powell and manage the fed « his own way », I emptied all my trading accounts and bought gold.
I guess I’m not alone, gold is exploding.
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The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
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In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them.
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
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> isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want?
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
> even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's
Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
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Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
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Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
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> even the current administration want
Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
What a joke of a comment. Trump and Musk and Vance explicitly support every anti-EU party in a half-dozen EU countries. Cuz they wanna make EU stronger, durrr.
oh man, I agree with what you are saying but EU is a joke.!
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> In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
US perspective: EU looks like a great place to expand into once I've reached some critical size threshold. But I can't imagine starting a business there. In the US we have effectively limitless capital, tons of tech talent, and many fewer regulations.
Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
On the other hand, I could never imagine moving to the US. It seems like such a third world country in so many ways. The amount of households that cant afford a sudden $400 expense without borrowing. The childhood poverty rates. The maternal mortality rate. The traffic deaths (en even worse, the pedestrian traffic deaths going in the wrong direction fast), people dying at work, the fact that you managed to get hookworm BACK, the power grid (I love in a small society in Sweden and I have averages 6 minutes of power outages per year), people being functionally illiterate.
I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.
I am not sure I would be able to stand that.
As a European I'm glad for all of these pesky regulations. https://noyb.eu/en
> Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
Sounds like you're doing some shady, disgusting bullshit or you're exaggerating the regulations. I hope it's the latter.
EU market is by no mean easy, it's heavily fragmented requiring very often intense localization effort.
For sure. But a major goal of US foreign policy was to create an EU so it would be easier for trade. Backsliding on support, wanting to sabotage it, doesn’t help US companies as it just adds burden.
Seems easier to comply to the single market rules though than 50 odd different states.
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> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada
I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.
From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
> Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
Why did he threaten 100% tariffs?
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> there’s not an easy 3rd economy
There isn't right now but India very much wants to be that in about a decade
Some Americans. Others of us are very aware of this.
> 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
What about China? India?
To add to what has already been said:
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
india is a great market, but:
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
edit: fixed formatting.
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
There are plenty of viable alternatives. Perhaps not all are as polished as some of the mainstay US companies, but the funtionality is there. It's no surprise that people in the US are ignorant of the existence of the many excellent EU software companies and services.
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India.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
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Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
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There is also australian and british markets I assume?
100M people isn't nothing, but it is highly likely that EU products would compete strongly in those markets.
Britain is trying to get tighter with UE and back into the common market.
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> s in a somewhat unified market
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
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> They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
What failed with Mistral?
Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
> build a better model with lower latency.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
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> There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT
Before or after the bubble pops?
What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
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>There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
1. ChatGPT is shit
2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
China, India. There are little EU-wide network effects similar to American ones.
Outside companies don't do well in China
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
China: Everything that puts western buyers off Chinese stuff, same happens in reverse. E.g. translation is really really hard. Every previous time I have illustrated how bad Google Translate is at this by quoting the Chinese output, someone has missed the point and replied to tell me the output is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible.
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
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They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
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> When we piss everyone off in the EU
Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.
Canada is in the same boat as the EU -- desperately looking for alternative vendors at the moment.
Canada's government is not looking for MS or AWS alternatives.
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I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
Let's not go over the top.
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
An insider view: there is a major push in a lot of state related team & department at the moment to go “sovereign tooling”. With alternatives for a lot of stuff.
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
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It’s not just this, it’s the arrogant attitude of the administration on tarriffs, Ukraine, and a broad range of topics
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India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
Weird, because software has probably the lowest marginal cost of goods sold of any product or service. You can make money selling at almost any price.
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
What corporate norms are notably different in this context?
> nor respect corporate norms there.
What do you mean?
No, thank you. I would rather run Chinese spyware.
>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
Regulations are le bad.
- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
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We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.
> I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
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EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
In the tech sector, EU has been a colony of pretty much every other country which it used to colonize. IMO, the fines that the EU used to collect regularly from US big tech companies were bribes to keep suppressing the EU tech sector.
What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Ffmpeg.
Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
Idk, VLC is kinda everywhere and while not the super cutting edge of video playing anymore, is still pretty OK. If they'd just attach a chat and SIP client to VLC they'd be set.
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Impossible n'est pas français !
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
CYCLADES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES) was influential in the design of important Internet concepts like the OSI model and TCP.
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Countries are waking up to the danger of having the US in a position to take control of most of their computers and phones via software updates.
Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
For those who don't want to use Twitter:
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Or here's the linked article:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
And here's the app, Visio:
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio
> And here's the app, Visio
That UI looks suspiciously similar to Jitsi Meet. I wonder if it's based on it.
It says "powered by LiveKit": https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
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The reflex to bind Europe's IT with OSS is due to several factors, like Linus Torvalds being Finnish, Arch and SUSE having a European leadership, NEXT and OpenCloud started by German hands and an absence of a unicorn IT company in EU.
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change
it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
How much have the "tarrifs" (sic) increased the cost of "US services" by to EU providers?
[dead]
French report: The project presented is not new; it is a continuation of the Tixeo project (https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions... video-conferencing-service-tixeocloud/trial-tixeocloud/), which was already the recommended solution for French government officials, public companies and all large companies required to process confidential or classified data via video conferencing.
Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.). The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications.
I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite.
French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
The French Gendarmerie has been running Linux for a while now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Products don't necessarily win on merit.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
> Even though it is acceptable these days
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
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Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
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I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
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I have also seen situations where sales opted into Microsoft early on. When they grew in relation to engineering forced the rest of the company to standardize to Microsoft products so they could get better rates and “save money”.
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
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It wasn't seen as a priority national security measure before.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
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The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
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I see a "top-down" approach, actually.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
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> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
Given how software is largely delivered via SaaS models these days, I'd start with a Chrome OS competitor as a client
And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
Good luck getting the EU off Android and iOS?
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It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
I don’t think that’s accurate. These issues were always there, but “the sky is falling” rhetoric is all the rage at the moment (in both directions).
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Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.
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> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
And also, the speed at which you can build solutions has significantly been reduced because of AI. I wonder if this plays a role in their decision.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
You probably think about Munich and LiMux. Well, Microsoft had to move their German HQ there to get them back.
What I wonder is if there will be the pay for enticing developers to build it.
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
If they want to build viable competitive products then they'll need to pay for a lot more roles than just developers.
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> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
Tariffs are good now
> legit better
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
Teams is not better than Slack, but here we are ...
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
Half the EU are a few percentage points away from electing their version of trump.
EU stands against police states! Now here is our new best friend, China.
Better is not enough make people change, sadly. This is why VCs burn so much money to establish products.
You're delusional if you think people willingly use half of these products, remove the billions spent on lobbyism and these things will evaporate in 5 years tops
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...
- https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
> it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want
That's a category error. It's a social construction, a thing that emerges from the interactions of many humans. "We", an authority nominally working for the citizens, can shape it by using the law, a blunt instrument. It's like how you can shape the development of a musician by using threats and a baseball bat.
The big difference is that USA was nor perceived as a threat before. It is acutely dangerours now and there is no perspective of it changing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
It will mean little if the infrastructure is still dependent on volatile partners (and I'm bundling allies and adversaries in this).
The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...).
Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities.
And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
I really hope Marc Andreessen is happy.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
Carried interest loophole
He's helping with a fascist takeover of the country, why wouldn't they be happy?
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> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.
Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.
I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
The EU commission would be in an interesting position to mandate American platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, etc...) to support interoperability in order to avoid "market distortion".
Meaning the US based companies would bear _some_ of the burden of making it easier to ditch them, and switch to "sovereign" solutions.
The rest of the world would have a vested interest in letting this happen, since it would also reduce _their_ dependence on the US.
The question then becomes "what happens first":
1 - European commission pressuring the Irish government to send its police to seize AWS servers in Dublin (when fines are not enough any more)
2 - US administration pressuring the tech companies to shut down service in Europe (when threats are not enough any more)
So I've opened their AWS replacement website (Outscale), Computing page.
No dedicated servers (VM only). Ok let's check VM price https://en.outscale.com/customized-virtual-machines/
Press the "Do you have a Cloud Project?" which is the only button? Oops! Something went wrong here.
Is this supposed to be an AWS replacement?
Outscale is kind of the stereotypical bureaucratic French thing. It's made by Dassault, that's better known for industrial stuff (like SolidWorks), not for modern-ish software.
For a more of an AWS replacement, look at Scaleway. It really is more what we think about when talking "public cloud": self-serve compute, with lots of managed services, actual API and Terraform, actual K8s, etc. (managed services is why I don't mention OVH, which is often touted as a "cloud provider", yet lacks a large managed services offering).
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For all these there are protocols that could allow interoperability in-between offers, EU policy makers seem to be aware of the issue given what was mandated to Whatsapp. Let's hope for the best outcome!
France’s govt can probably mandate adoption in the guise of national security (which would be true tbh) and with the current rhetoric their people will be welcoming of it. It’ll probably suck but the tradeoffs could be worth it, not too unlike rationing during WW2 times. And I’m sure there are a lot of engineers and companies looking forward to getting that sweet govt contracts.
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
https://galene.org/
+1.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
What happened to Jitsi?
It is still a thing. I used it 2 days ago actually.
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment. Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
I don't see the dependency on these productivity and communication tools as that difficult of a problem to solve.
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Hardware is the biggest problem: PCs (CPUs, RAMs, GPUs), Cellphones, routers, etc.
Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.
Now everybody realises you can trust no one.
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
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ScaleWay and OVH are already filling this gap.
I'm also trying Gcore and so far, apart for an intial problem with payments, has been good. It has a lot of services
StackIT is the AWS competitor actually, OVH is not really laid out to be a hyperscaler.
CleverCloud, Hetzner
Good luck with OVH. Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts.
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Jitsi meet exists for long time and it works. What is needed is eu sovereign clouds
They need to do both the hard things and the easy things, and do them in parallel.
Which they are.
Stop being reasonable!
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
They should probably fund their military first.
It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
That's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones. In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less. But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best.
Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU. Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".
I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.
>They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
The US is literally threatening to invade an EU overseas territory.
Comrade, what is the weather in St. Petersburg?
> They should probably fund their military first.
They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth.
> It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.
Can access X because it's X and locally blocked, "ironic" to use Twitter to post about sovereignty.
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique
Ironic to use Github to post about sovereignty )
I'm trying to not use it myself but yes, la suite numérique should get out of GitHub.
They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
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That was a lowry response.
Built using Django!
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The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- LinkedIn
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
It might be worth considering that if those are intro classes, then it's not like they can't be easily replaced: it's not like the audience is wedded to any of those at an introductory level.
We need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.
Until now nobody thought it was a problem. At least not a big one. The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
Small steps, but steps.
>Until now nobody thought it was a problem.
I've seen these "EU digital sovereignty is around the corner!!" articles weekly for the past 10 years
The cost to bootstrap a sovereign cloud offering in Europe that can even begin to compare to the big ones in the US would be humongous. There would need to be a solid, multi-year incentive for a company/startup to even want to attempt it. It has to come from the top. Else force the big US clouds operating in Europe to be ready to effectively detach from their US counterparts if shit hits the fan, though this one's probably not realistic.
I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
For what it’s worth, Amazon’s largest profit center is AWS. Likewise for Microsoft and Azure.
As a dual US/EU national who would love to move to Europe, I, for one, welcome the increase in tech demand on that side of the pond.
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
Even something already available off the shelf!
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
One of my networking groups uses Jitsi. It's fine.
It's pretty awful to setup compared to the Livekit-based solution.
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
We're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA.
Every choice comes with a cost.
With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
What is that option?
Visio with live kit (part of lasuite) or opendesk with jitsi would be my guess.
https://livekit.io/ https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
https://jitsi.org/ https://www.opendesk.eu/en
As an aside I am surprised it has taken this long but seems inevitable now given the last 18 months.
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Visio from https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
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This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
What's wrong with SEPA instant?
A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.
You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
I would love to switch away from Teams. Sadly the organizations I belong to do not want to pay for anything else.
was talking to a friend about this, there's wero but i haven't really seen it around (Germany).
The problem I've seen with this is that Wero works with banking applications that require either Google Play or App Store. Which means that you may not need an American company for the payment itself, but you now need an American company in the device you have to use for the payment.
The irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS.
Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.
The French government has its own version of Ubuntu, used by law enforcent, and is supposedly slated to be used by all agencies in 2027.
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
> in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam
They will learn :-)
Judging by the amount of people who still suck at Zoom or Teams after 6 years ... I am not that sure :)
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Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
As much as I cheer for OpenOffice, it sucks. And it has been decades now.
I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.
Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.
There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
OpenOffice? Do you mean LibreOffice?
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
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It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
They've already invested in Matrix. Why not use that?
Yeah, I remember reading about an article on France govt adopting element/matrix. Surprised it didn´t go mainstream in other departments/companies/people.
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
I think it's a bit of a Pandora's box issue. Their eyes are now open to the very real, no longer hypothetical, threat. There's no going back.
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.
And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
the Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return.
as it was, so shall it always be.
any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
Isn't that what "LaSuite" is? I know this particular instance is for the French government; but isn't it open source?
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
I found the answer in the FAQ. Anyone can deploy it in their own instance.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#:~:text=LaSuite%20étant%2...
De Gaulle strikes back)
I like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.
Every country should ban American social networks and messaging tools ASAP
The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.
US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
They won’t be able to make products as great as here in the US
They don't need to. They need just good enough. Don't underestimate "Made in Europe", just like "Made in America"
The actual website listing all the tools of this office suite (in French)
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products
Honestly the greatest thing trump did is help us, French, and maybe Europeans, to get back our sovereignty.
I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it.
Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too.
Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending.
For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
> i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan
Sure, and let's give Ukraine to Russia while we're here so we can get their gas. The problem with the bullies is that they'll keep taking.
Ukraine is European problem. Taiwan, Who cares in Europe ?
As long as we have access to microprocessors…
Trump v2 is the greatest change in world policy, adapt or die trying.
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Finally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
Don't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
> if an angry nerd
Ah yes, the mythical AngryOpenSourceNerd, heard about his Kick channel.
@see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
This is the kind of thing France often wants to do yet never implements.
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
Replicating the software is easy, running the services at AWS-scale is hard.
Would you need to though?
If an organisation ran it's own instance, it would only need to scale for that organisation ( including any external attends over a bridge ).
That does of course assume companies have the expertise/appetite to run things themselves.
This would be a great thing for humanity as a whole, but not for France. So I doubt it will happen. Hope strings eternal.
If they did it by growing open source competitors, it would be brilliant. Linux-equivalents for all major categories.
Semi-related thought bubble:
I wonder what would happen if EU countries started encouraging ad blocking via their ISP DNS servers?
Ought to add X to that list as well!
n1, should drop X as well
Indians are doing the same too.
"You know what they call Zoom in Paris?"
"What do they call it?"
"Le Zoom"
Jit.si supports the EU privacy rules
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Which itself links to:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
I live and work in Germany and know many people across Europe. Admittedly more in Western Europe, and admittedly my bubble leans toward traditional industries.
I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action.
Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
Same. French here. I can't stand hearing these words anymore, when at the same time I read that the French intelligence services closed a 5-year deal with Palantir.
Well, my company is! I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS with Volumes. It's a small step, but it works for us and it is way cheaper!
> What I don’t see is action.
Building serious products and services in this space is easily 5 year investment, by that time there will be a new US administration.
Hope is not a strategy, but it's certainly cheaper in the short run.
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But have you divested from US assets?
Maybe one should, considering we just deployed armed troops with live ammunition to scare of America.
I fear we don't know how close this was. Maybe, we'll know in 50 years.
translation (and without twitter): https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-...
The US has already employed its technology and financial instruments, including sanctions, to coerce and control its partners. Sanctioning an ICC prosecutor and subsequently restricting Microsoft’s access to his emails and documents are just a few instances of this. They have demonstrated their willingness to use their technology, financial instruments, and sanctions against their partners. It seems almost too late for Europe to achieve its independence in both technological and financial spheres.
I pulled all my servers from the US months ago. Everyone I talk to is doing the same. Tech giants are going to feel this, especially when the AI bubble is going to burst.
I wish I could cancel my Office subscription but my kids still need it for school. I wrote them to take a hard look at that requirement.
They should just fund pairux
I’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense.
I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
If only they'd taken their reliance on Russian natural gas so seriously.
Silicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.
I wonder if the EU will begin trying to recruit American software engineers. I’d love to move to France.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
With a baby on the way, I'd seriously consider it for their lifetime benefits. Where does one begin looking?
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Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
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They've been incentivizing it for years. Talent passport, EU Blue card and the Tech Visa. As I have heard they'll pay you to move there.
Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.
Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
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But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings. You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world). And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
Europe is a _very_ different place.
Not everything here is so bad.
> They've been incentivizing it for years.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
https://ngisargasso.eu/
Will not. You should love to move youself to pay 30% more taxes and work for 30% less salary (not sure what percentage to apply first).
> pay 30% more taxes
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
more like 50+ % less salary, just saying
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
Do you have a suggestion of where to begin looking? Doesn't have to be France either.
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In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
the first 10 what? Years? It's actually not like that: https://www.government.nl/topics/income-tax/shortening-30-pe...
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
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Isn't the primary tongue of locals in the Netherlands Dutch? Yes you know English, but don't the locals speak Dutch or German to each other?
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Let's hope the alternatives they build are open source
Link to the actual article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
Skype wasn't _that_ great at chat especially to be completely fair. But it definitely was okay for everything, that's for sure...
Jami is read for the big time!
For a fraction of what these products cost France could fund open source alternatives.
Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
You mean something like LiveKit, with a basic implementation of user management etc such as https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet ?
They do. « we are committed to contributing back to the LiveKit community whenever feasible ».
The tool they're building is open source: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
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Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
Not to mention JD Vance uses it so it's like sharing a room with a massive dog turd
Politicians use it a lot. Because media and journalist started using it.
Because for better or worse it still has significance and popularity. Nothing else really comes close.
Because they EU still can't make software and most people in America don't care.
We’re talking about Twitter. Mastodon exists. It is not about making software. Maybe about selling it or marketing.
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It's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The "Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this.
The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
I've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.
I moved my stuff to Hetzner. Obv I have no idea about your situation, but I found it fairly trivial for my stuff.
But I can't figure out how to replace GSuite.
Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties.
And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects.
Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
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... probably using whatng cartel web engines, and that would be ridiculous for sure.
This is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves.
So a huge waste of taxpayers money...
This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
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Deleted tweet?
It's difficult to take an announcement like this seriously when it's posted on Twitter.
This is just some account from a tech journalist
This is the press release:
https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat...