Comment by rvnx
1 day ago
It's good to differentiate truly independent tech from the unfortunately common government-pushed French-tech that are US-tech rewrapped.
e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing
It's a great move overall.
1 day ago
It's good to differentiate truly independent tech from the unfortunately common government-pushed French-tech that are US-tech rewrapped.
e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing
It's a great move overall.
Qwant is working on that. Together with Ecosia they're building their own index called the European Search Perspective:
"Today, Europe receives 99% of the answers to search queries from external infrastructures. We believe, however, that a higher level of digital sovereignty is essential for a functioning democracy and economy. With our new web index, we are creating a European perspective on politics, culture and values. This is a long overdue step towards more plurality in the digital world, which is also being called for by our society."
https://www.eu-searchperspective.com
> a European perspective on politics, culture and values
To be honest this does not sound much better. 40 years ago maybe I would have preferred EU values over the US' puritan values. Nowadays I'd just expect a different flavor of poison.
If they were a monopolist, sure. But as an alternative, I'll take it.
At least when you have a few different values you can pick and compare but yeah.
As far as I know, Qwant indexes itself and substitute with existing crawler results, which seems a reasonable compromise.
Ok? You could make the same argument about Chinese tech, German tech, or American tech.
Still less, there is a lot of sovereignty-washing in EU, and specifically in France because this gives you access to grants and public markets.
Bpifrance, the Caisse des Dépôts, France 2030, Horizon Europe, etc.
To access that money, you need the right narrative. So companies learn to wrap their pitch in sovereignty language, get the grants, and then quietly build on top of AWS, Azure or GCP.
Not that it's dramatic, but there is a difference between hosted in France (where dependency still exists), and hosted + engineered in France.
Hopefully this transition to Linux is going to push France government to get rid of Crowdstrike, it's insane they let such backdoor run inside.
As a French citizen who's been building an open source Dropbox alternative for almost a decade [1], the sovereignty talk in France makes me cringe. Everyone has the word in their mouth, but nobody bothers to even search for alternatives, let alone give them a chance. France represents about 1% of my customer base with only a single customer: LVMH. I've had a whole bunch of French universities contacting me, nobody was willing to contribute toward the development because culturally we assume libre software must be free of charge so you'd better either beg for grants or have a rich uncle to sponsor your life. I've tried reaching out to the people who talk loud about sovereignty. Turns out it's just something they say at conferences to entertain each other as they have no power to actually make it happen, and don't even get me started on public markets.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash