Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

There's simply no option for digital sovereignty other than cultivating a strong domestic software industry. As the source details, much of this exposure is being done with full understanding of the risks and costs.

The article also refers to some report claiming that European solutions are "wrongly judged to be too costly or inefficient". I'd be interested to read it if anyone has a translation. Even for something as basic as word processing software, every case I've seen so for the alternatives quickly lands on "you have to accept rough edges because that's the cost of data sovereignty" - much easier for a hobbyist or politician to say than an IT director charged with making sure your organization runs well.

View on HN

The French state is working on a google-docs open source alternative: https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/

The sad part is, both the EU and the UK (which has the same issue) have the capacity to do this as we have enough software engineers. But most software companies end up being bought out by US ones at some point.

> There's simply no option for digital sovereignty other than cultivating a strong domestic software industry.

Yes, but they tried and can't.

Those ideas of domestic computer industry and digital sovereignty have been around since the 60s.

The French had Bull which is now Atos and they failed miserably.

France was very impressive after WW2, they build almost on their own a nuclear weapons, a nuclear energy, aeronautic, military industry and impressive space capabilities.

After that you would expect them to have built a serious competitor to Intel and Microsoft but they didn't. They can't even built basic digital capabilities to support a bureaucracy.

My guess is a very different generation arrived in the 60s-70s in the workplace and in charge: the Silent Generation and the Boomers.

Those generations were not about building anything but more about entitlements and collecting dividends. But of course it takes quite some time for things to get really bad. Information technologies slowly took over many aspects over our societies over the last 50 years and now they find out they do not have sovereignty anymore.

They can, they just don't really want to, as the dozens of anecdotes in this very comment section reveal. None of these things are about technical competence or capabilities. They're all about organizations, politics, fiefdoms and enormous amounts of intentional obstruction by those who want to keep the status quo. If the country would collectively decide they'd want to change it, it could be done quite rapidly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com