Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

The US sells software to the EU. To me is constantly amazing that US citizens and US gov thinks it can just pull the plug without consequence to itself.

You pull the plug the money stops rolling in. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something vs buying something but buying is a ALOT easier than selling.

You can easily choose where to buy but choosing to sell is a lot trickier. Pull the plug on AI and the EU will switch to Chinese models. Trade negotiations and relations are very fragile and difficult to curate and maintain. Very easy to rip up.

View on HN

You seem to ignore the fact that changes take time.

There are entire governments in the EU with workflows built around Microsoft products that have no real 1:1 alternatives. If a governmental procedure stipulates that a ministry uses Windows w/ Office365, it uses Windows w/ Office365, no room for an argument. If anybody pulls a plug here, the consequences will be unimaginable.

It's nice that a single German state has switched to LibreOffice, but the rest of Germany, or the remaining 26 countries might take years, if not decades, to certify and permit someone else's solution.

If the plug is fully pulled, the EU could confiscate some European Azure/Office365 servers and 'put the software on the market'. Windows is even easier, I'm sure in such a situation the EU would be happy to limit the restrictions on reverse engineering to block license verification. I'm sure that there are some hard drives on European territory with the full Windows source code as well.

Copyright is a sacred cow to EU politicians. Just look at how they resp9nded to the Stop Killing Games petition. No chance they make it legal to pirate anything.

France would like a word:

https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...

Tech is super important but it's not energy or food. The threat of a 'Microsoft Famine' would only lead to the EU being forced to send that money to China and develop it's own tech sector more thoroughly. The US was powerful precisely because of its allies supporting it. Threatening those same allies isn't going to get the US further ahead than it already is in the world. Yes, there would be massive disruption and lead to emergencies but the US wants to change the world order where it was already number 1 it is free to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com