Comment by bsder
18 days ago
> the issue is with specifically US politics and social issues being everywhere. It drowns out all attempts at discourse for anything else
Unfortunately, US politics also drives tech issues elsewhere like the EU. For example, local data control is a big thing that some of us have been screaming about forever but nobody paid attention to--until US politics made it a hot button issue.
And, to be honest, if the EU would get off its ass and at least try to foster some alternatives, even those of us in the US would benefit. EU alternatives would mean that people in the US could finally vote against the megajillionaires with their wallets.
> Americans, including people here, seem uniquely incapable of nuance in their thinking when it comes to politics.
Bullets and beatings don't leave much room for nuance regardless of country.
The EU is trying but these things have to happen bottom–up. The EU Council or EU Parliament isn't a software development shop. They allocate funds to groups like NLNET who allocate them to a selection of the projects they get proposals for. NLNET can only allocate funds to something an individual or small group proposes. If you want to propose something, please go ahead.
Capitalists can also start software businesses and sell their software, but those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
> NLNET can only allocate funds to something an individual or small group proposes. If you want to propose something, please go ahead.
Well, gee, let's look at the sponsorship page for KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/
I see a couple EU companies, but no EU governments. It takes a paltry $15K to be a Platinum sponsor.
I picked KiCad because PCB design is critical military infrastructure, the alternative programs are almost all under non-EU jurisdictions and could be pulled, and KiCad is both open source and local desktop to top it all off. This is exactly the kind of quiet, unflashy toil that desperately needs support from a government entity.
Lots of areas need support for open source alternatives that are controlled by proprietary software that might vaporize. I picked PCB design because it's an easy target. Cadence and Synopsys have locks on VLSI design domains that could get yanked from the EU. VHDL tooling is still disastrously poor. Everybody could use an alternative 3D modeling kernel (the EU is a little better here because the dominant proprietary kernels are from Dassault Systèmes and Siemens). I'm sticking to software as the domain because the purpose of the funding is obvious (pay developers, duh), but it also applies to things like small manufacturing and maintaining domestic supply chains (but the purpose and focus becomes a lot messier).
And yet, everywhere I look, any project I pick, crickets.
I don't expect the EU to front run, but something like KiCad is 3 bloody decades old.
> those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
And yet you had the rise of Akihabara as an electronic parts mecca which then later got eclipsed by Shenzhen. And that's not even talking about the fact that the modern computing sits atop a mountain of stuff developed out of the VLSI Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project).
All of those occurred because their respective governments threw money around.
Sure, maybe you won't create another Silicon Valley hare, but, perhaps, just perhaps, you might create a relentless, open source EU tortoise that slowly displaces the proprietary software. The EU is good at slow--relentless, not so much.
Sadly, a continual state of inertia and sclerosis and failure around tech seems to be historically European: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-eurochip/
There is an EU initiative to bring in chip manufacturing but it's not related to open source. For sovereignty purposes, airgapped software or locally made software is as good as open source and it's usually higher quality.
There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs. And I repeat myself: NLNET can only rule on the proposals it receives. Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
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>And, to be honest, if the EU would get off its ass and at least try to foster some alternatives, even those of us in the US would benefit.
What exactly do you want the EU, the Brussels based institution, to do here? Because AWS didn't come into existence because Uncle sam came in and twisted Bezo's hand telling him to invent a hyperscaler that will conquer the world.
EU's lack of comparable domestic alternatives is a consequence of the failure of its entrepreneurship and free market in the SW private sector, and nothing that EU institution can do about it to magically fix this since the solution is not MORE regulatory interference form government bureaucrats who don't know how the internet works.
You might be able to force innovation if the governments can throw money at the problem if the VC sector is lacking, but they can't force economies of scale and mass adoption without a China style great firewall, in which case you'd then have even bigger issues.