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Comment by sfvisser | Hacker News Reader

Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US.

And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source alternatives.

The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form a threat to European citizens is because for some reasons we have zero local alternatives.

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Europe does build its own software. And anything even remotely successful then gets acquired by some US entity.

This has been a common theme. Dassault owns CATIA and Solidworks tough, and they've been used a lot in Europe.

Ever tried to use CATIA?

Best thing there is if you want a head trip back to the 70's

Probably, but Solidworks is quite well regarded.

used CATIA - it's like C compared to the host of the fad languages out there.

Dassault does both Catia and Solidworks, and as far as I know, they're French.

The need for friction-free interoperability combined with the technical challenges of competing vendors implementing fully interoperable software means most domain-specific software markets are an economic natural monopoly where only one product can dominate.

There is no obvious good economic or technological solution to this, short of heavily regulating software vendors so they are responsive to customer needs or stripping vendors of their copyrights and open sourcing everything. Neither choice is politically possible.

Well, we do, and we are pretty successful.

Archicad is Hungarian, Allplan is German, Tekla originates from Finnland.

(Also please note: the offices which signed the open letter to Autodesk are mostly UK-based, so strictly speaking are not members of the EU ;))

Isn't ArchiCAD european?

It is, it's Hungarian.

CERN sponsors Kicad for EDA.

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