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Comment by clarionbell | Hacker News Reader

Not really. EU is actually trying to decouple. But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support. There is not a single company in EU that could replace, even a considerable part, of software stack provided by Google and Apple.

And, unless the regulatory environment changes., there probably never will be.

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Thr answer to US tech giants are not homegrown EU tech giants, but international free software (Free as in Freedom). We already have free operating systems: Linux, BSD. Office software: LibreOffice, etc.

EU regulators have stop listening to tech company lobbyists.

Is any of that capable of replacing google and apple on mobile?

Clearly it isn’t. This is what techies forget: The mass amount of Europeans don’t give 2 shits about digital sovereignty or open source. Christ, people go to mobile operator shops and give their unlocked phones to consultants to install or remove software for them. You want them to install GrapheneOS or manage a rooted device? That ain’t even funny.

The only short-term solution is more regulation and more EU-centralized solutions, but of course this is only ok until the next chat-control drama.

Long term, in practice we need single European stock market and a way to provide funding to European companies from any member state, so to be competitive globally without being constantly restricted by every member state’s bureaucracy.

> we need single European stock market

New York alone has 2 stock exchanges. I don’t think that companies being listed in London, Paris and Frankfurt (they generally are listed on several anyway) is the actual issue.

Especially these days the stock market is the very final stage anyway, most funding for growing tech companies is private funds, vc etc.

> Clearly it isn’t. This is what techies forget: The mass amount of Europeans don’t give 2 shits about digital sovereignty or open source.

When Trump was invading Denmark, a huge % of Danes would've given a shit about sovereignty from the US. And that's the moment to pounce.

But that moment is gone.

We need competing (and competent) lobbyists. Unfortunately one side has all the money, so there is a clear disadvantage

Support https://edri.org if you want good lobbyists on your side.

How much money did the EU finance towards alternatives last year then?

I hear them complaining but for now, the alternatives are mostly run by hobbyists.

We're starting from so low that even a few dozen millions would help a lot.

> €2 billion over seven years to fund alternatives to proprietary software

I'll believe it when I'll see it, for now I haven't seen any of the Android forks (LineageOS, EOS, GrapheneOS...) or Linux OS (Phosh, Plasma mobile, Ubports, ...) get any funds from the EU.

You will see it when you look.

For context, as yearly spending of 285 million €, that compares to building roughly 20 km of motorway, or 0.5% of EU's agriculture subsidies, or half what the German federal government pays Microsoft per year.

Edit: 2000m/7 is 285m, not 466m.

> if they just spent a little, maybe as much as a couple of million it would make a huge difference, but they refuse to ...

they do.

> 250 million isn't much ...

sigh.

I’d love for some of my tax money in the EU to go towards both supporting FOSS development and various home grown software, instead of seeing proprietary DBs and OSes being used wherever I look. Like come on you can’t afford enough devs to make some govt. service well and yet you’re gonna back it by Oracle and Windows Server for the apps, really?

The EU's NGI Zero in cooperation with NLNet has been funding quite a bit of postmarketOS

https://nlnet.nl/project/postmarketOS/

https://nlnet.nl/project/MobileSettings

https://nlnet.nl/project/pmOS-23-24

https://nlnet.nl/project/postmarketOS-daemons

https://nlnet.nl/project/pmOS-25-26

I think if NGI Zero had been around when Meego was killed, we might be in a better situation now.

I also get the feeling, that the fact that there is so little reported and discussed about this funding reflects the actual level of interest in alternatives.

> But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support

There shouldn't need to be. Realistically for something like this an EU backed highly-audited non-profit should be in place for permanent highly controlled services like this that do not rely on any non-EU entities for it to function.

This is simply untrue. The tech is there, the will (money) isn't.

The money can't all come from the state. If the EU wants to compete, it should create a common market worth its name where EU companies can raise billions like American ones. If that doesn't happen but we instead pat ourselves on the back for setting aside a pithy 5 million Euros in some EU budget to support open source, it's never going to happen.

Already in flight with EU-INC

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DgUXH14By0w

> it should create a common market worth its name where EU

There is no reason to believe that the EU (rather than the market participants in the EU) is in any way capable of that regardless of the amount of political will.

Spending massive amounts of money without knowing what you are trying to do or how will just result in a massive amount of grift and corruption

EU has no issues with wasting and burning large amounts of money for no particular reason. The issue is that the people there are incapable (or don’t want to) make the right decisions for any of this to happen.

Understandable. However every new solution should be built from the ground up and be fully decoupled even if the migration of old services might take a while.

For this specifically EU could surely (only in theory since statistically the average EU bureaucrat is a pompous idiot to whom the word “accountability” is an entirely inconceivable concept) have something developed for a sane price in a reasonable amount of time.

> But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support.

Everyone who says something like this should be forced to use one of the alternatives for at least a couple of months and then reassess why people don't use them.

Personally I'm using a Volla Quintus with Ubuntu Touch (ubports is a German foundation) because I'm a masochist.

Jolla?

> Not really. EU is actually trying to decouple. But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support.

If the EU was trying to decouple they'd mandate at least including a hardware token option as an alternative. This is not new technology, it's existing and has been in use for decades.

They're not trying to decouple, so they haven't mandated it.

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