Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).
I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.
Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.
Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.
've been using the docs tool in my homelab for ~3 months now as a knowledge base for some projects I've been working on with some friends.
It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.
I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.
Refreshing and impressive indeed. I wish other governments did this, esp those that are larger / have a reasonably large tech scene (e.g. Northern Europe, Nordic, AUS, Japan, Canada, Germany, India, etc).
It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.
I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.
Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.
Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy.
Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.
Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you.
France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)
>For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does
I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.
The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.
Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.
Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.
I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.
This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)
How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.
What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably copy text from messages. The mobile app logs you out randomly. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.
I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me.
Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.
It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?
As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
> I don't need one app to do everything half-assed
That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."
Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.
Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.
It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.
Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.
If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
It’s not why your big corp chooses teams and the msft suite. From a corp perspective they don’t care about your edge case. There’s only - is it good for 90% of my use cases across the enterprise? And - do I get a bundle discount? Last but not the least - do I need to expend developer resources on it vs anything else?
Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.
Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.
The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop
Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.
Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be).
There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".
Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.
There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.
Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions.
I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…
This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population.
I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.
As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.
Sure, but at least you have homegrown car companies. They make cutting edge cars that are mainstream, and even popular abroad.
You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.
Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.
You say stuff like this, and then simultaneously complain when the US winds up owning the entire technology stack and being the predominate western superpower.
So which is it? Does scale not matter, or are you unhappy with the outcome of ignoring it?
I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.
That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.
Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.
> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap
Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".
OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.
That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive. It was the right call, by the US, to put things in this way, but the European disadvantage is not for technical merits.
> This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive.
Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.
I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.
And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.
In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.
Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.
> which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.
I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software, nor is being a majority contributor. These things are very obvious to anyone that regularly works with FOSS in a professional capacity.
It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)
Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs.
EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.
As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.
> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.
I am French. When I look at the EU I see great potentials but the effect is a huge bureaucratic mess that is advantageous for everyone involved.
About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.
There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.
With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.
We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.
leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies
When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).
The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)
Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.
This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.
Europe's main strategy these days seems to be blaming others instead of looking at themselves.
For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.
They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.
They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.
At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.
You are framing this as moral blame. It isn't about that. It is about strategic risk.
Why would we blame the US for our own inability to build a viable software industry? Europe has been painfully aware for years that this is self-inflicted.
The reason there is now serious talk about reducing dependence on the US is not resentment, it is risk. Dependence used to be a convenience. It is increasingly a liability. Trust in long-term stability, rule continuity, and alignment of interests is no longer something we can assume. That changes the calculus, regardless of who is "at fault".
From the perspective of someone who works in software, I’m glad this conversation is finally happening. It’s not about assigning blame. It is about taking responsibility for capabilities we should never have outsourced so completely in the first place.
If this looks like blame from the outside, that’s a misunderstanding of what self-correction looks like.
There's plenty of chatter these days that Europe needs to be more independent from other powers, needs to be more competitive and so on.
What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.
* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.
>>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.
People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings. Prices levels do not come down without a depression, even if inflation slows. Their only solution is wages going up. Do they have a mechanism to push wages up? Taxes must go up, they have been too low for too long and the debt has accumulated (~$38T in US treasuries alone) and will need to be paid back or defaulted on. Insurance costs continue to rise due to rapidly increasing costs of materials and labor, as well as climate change (the US is currently spending ~$1B/year on climate driven events). Growth is over because the US population is not growing (tangentially, total fertility rate is below replacement rate in more than half of countries in the world, and this trend will continue). 401ks predicated on the S&P500 are held up by AI investment (which is outpacing consumer spending, the primary driver of the US economy, over the last year to the tune of ~$400B) and the Mag 7. When this stalls, everyone is going to be sad and not feel as wealthy as they did previously (“wealth effect”).
Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.
(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)
> Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings.
This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Politics is completely driven by uncritical "just so" narratives. The people pushing the discourse never check or justify their assumptions with actual data. This is the real issue.
> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Which begs the question: does democracy still work when voters are so easily misled? I don’t believe that the current generation is fundamentally more or less intelligent than the previous ones. Is technology to blame for disseminating misinformation too rapidly for us to cope?
The early American system was never designed to function as a pure democracy. The founders were openly skeptical of direct rule by popular will, fearing volatility, mob psychology, and the tendency for short-term emotional reactions to override long-term stability. Instead, they constructed a layered federal republic intended to filter public opinion through successive levels of deliberation.
In the original structure, the public directly elected members of the House of Representatives. This chamber was meant to serve as the immediate voice of the population — responsive, numerous, and frequently subject to elections. It represented popular sentiment but was intentionally balanced by slower, more insulated institutions.
The Senate originally functioned as that stabilizing counterweight. Senators were selected by state legislatures rather than direct vote. This meant they were accountable primarily to the governments of sovereign states rather than transient public passions. The Senate therefore protected state interests, ensured continuity of policy, and acted as a brake on sudden shifts in national mood. The 17th Amendment, which later established direct election of senators, fundamentally altered this federal balance by shifting the Senate toward popular representation rather than state representation.
The presidency was also designed to be buffered from direct democratic selection. The Electoral College was not merely a ceremonial intermediary. Electors were expected to exercise independent judgment and represent state-level deliberation. The system assumed electors would be politically informed individuals capable of evaluating candidates beyond campaign popularity or mass persuasion. In theory, this created a safeguard against demagogues or candidates elevated purely through public excitement.
The vice presidency was structured differently from modern expectations. Originally, the candidate receiving the second highest number of electoral votes became vice president. This design forced cooperation between rival factions and ensured that dissenting political voices remained inside executive governance rather than entirely excluded from power. Although this sometimes created tension, it reflected a belief that competing perspectives strengthened stability.
Underlying these mechanisms was a broader philosophy: governance should incorporate public input while filtering it through layers of institutional judgment. The founders feared what they called “tyranny of the majority,” where temporary popular consensus could override minority rights, long-term national interests, or constitutional boundaries.
Advocates of restoring earlier structural features often argue that modern reforms unintentionally removed stabilizing mechanisms. They contend that direct election of senators nationalized political incentives, encouraging senators to prioritize national party platforms over state-specific interests. Similarly, modern expectations that presidential electors must follow popular vote outcomes arguably transformed the Electoral College from a deliberative body into a procedural formality.
From this viewpoint, reintroducing intermediary decision makers could theoretically slow political volatility, encourage more qualified candidate evaluation, and strengthen federalism by returning power to state governments. However, proponents of such reforms often acknowledge that intermediary systems would require strong transparency, accountability standards, and anti-corruption safeguards. Without those protections, layered elector systems could risk elite capture or reduced public legitimacy.
Critics of restoring these structures typically argue that expanded direct voting increased democratic legitimacy, voter participation, and political equality. They often contend that intermediary systems historically enabled exclusion and reduced accountability to the general population.
The debate therefore centers on a classic governance tradeoff: stability and deliberation versus direct popular sovereignty. The original American constitutional framework leaned toward stability through representation filters, while modern reforms have leaned toward expanding direct electoral influence.
> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.
> Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
Talk to actual Trump voters and you'll see they support his tariffs and immigration crackdowns because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community. They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them. Even though that's totally backwards, and Trump is just making everything worse, that's what they believe.
Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.
> because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community.
Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.
To the contrary! They were tricked to believe that they were part of society. They aren't. By voting for Trump they reassured themselves that it won't happen to them. Often times racism against the newest group of immigrants coming from the group of immigrants before them is seen by the latter as a rite of passage to be accepted into US society.
The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today. Now they are seen as white but before WWI they weren't seen as white by the WASPs. And it's totally normal for some of the second or third generation immigrants to become racist against new immigrants. Rite of passage.
Yes. And they still remember where they are coming from and they fear that they might again lose their piece of the pie to the groups that are considered more "American", so they feel the need to prove their place in society by cheering the leader who is preaching that the pie is getting smaller and that someone has to leave the table. This fear is handed down over generations and for some families or communities it transforms into hatred. This mechanism is very often played by amoral populists because it works so well.
Many of the most disgusting and radical Democracy hating people in Trumps inner circle are Catholics by the way. Go figure.
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy.
> "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong country again."
...
> One poll, from Pew, suggested that 93% of Latinos who cast their votes for Trump rated the economy as their primary issue, with violent crime and immigration trailing far behind.
> Data from the new CBS poll shows that a significant majority of Latinos - 61% - disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, while 69% disapprove of his handling of inflation. The vast majority said they judge the performance of the US economy through prices.
The dems are just as corrupt, just wiith a nicer smile.
Eu citizen, here - all politicians are bent.
Anecdata: Anyone who votes for a politician should stfu, stop complaining and live with it. Why should i suffer alone?
Disenfranchised? Not me - idgaf. I just hope the eu gets its act together and actually does something, but it will be difficult; language alone, being one of them, and "my pie", another.
People should have spoken up in town hall meetings and protest on the streets years ago. Now it's a bit too late, but better late than never. Americans rather sit on the couch, watch TV or be absorbed by their smartphone than to go out to their representatives and demand accountability. Instead they "shit" on every institution and person who seems to fight for justice and liberty. You get what you deserve guys. You can't vote with your wallet. You have to try to get to those people in power IN PERSON and pressure them. That's the only thing they understand.
You know what the most effective instrument of power is? Distance. The rich and powerful distance themselves physically from the people, so the demands, worries, accusations, questions etc can't reach them.
The reality in 2024 was that yes, the alternative was more of the previous administration.
Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.
The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.
What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.
You're pretty representative of why Republicans can't stand Democrats. They make wild accusations about everything being rooted in "white supremacy", present themselves as intellectual superiors (as if a significant portion of the Democrat voting block isn't full of similarly poor and uneducated people), demand compliance with social movements that a significant portion of the population find bizarre and off-putting. And if you complain, "well you're just too stupid to realize this is actually good for you."
Does changing the messaging ever cross the mind of Democrats? No, why would it? The people who vote against them are just stupid, obviously. I mean why do we even let these rubes vote?
Voting for a traitorous convicted felon is why I can't stand federal level Republican voters.
What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).
> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.
If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.
The Epstein revelations show that pretty much everyone that could make it to the ballot list has skeletons in their closet. The only difference is that some of them manage to hide it better than others.
I doubt that, but in reality, Harris was on the ballot, and was squeaky clean relative to her opposition.
And there's levels of skeletons, but calling up a governor and asking them to find votes and baselessly casting doubts on elections and endorsing and freeing people who attacked the US government is not on the same level of everyone else's skeletons.
> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
If your position is that racism and sexism are the root of the problem — which I am not contesting — how wise do you think it was for the Democrats to try running with a black woman?
The Republican party is openly racist. More than it has ever been in the last 40 years! And you are claiming otherwise. You are actively looking the other way if you dismiss this. It's not normal and why should the Democrats copy the Republicans? So they lose the liberal voters who aren't okay with bigotry and revenge politics? Because no matter what the Democrats say, the MAGA Republicans will always beat them at that, and people will still vote for the OG racists anyway.
Your argument is coming up everytime when right-wing populists gain votes, and it's always a fatal trap. Merz in Germany claimed to beat the AfD (who is loved by Bannon and Musk and was loved by Epstein btw, all "wonderful" people), and it failed he barely made it to become chancellor. It also failed in the 90s during the first wave of racism in Germany after re-unification.
Failing to make xenophobic choices when it comes to...enterprise software, is the issue?
The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).
Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.
Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).
How someone voted has almost no bearing on the dangers of tech. The dangers were there before the last election and none of the candidates had strong positions regarding tech privacy. Microsoft would still be doing what it has been doing regardless of the election outcome. I wouldnt hold my breath that a European Teams/Zoom replacement will have robust encryption and privacy protection based on all the backdoor stuff I've heard being pushed in some European countries.
The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.
A reminder that in the last presidential election, the winner was decided by one of the smallest margins ever, and the winner only won a plurality, not a majority.
Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).
I remember a conversation I had with my uncle before the 2024 election during which I told him Donald Trump's leadership would result in a no-less-disastrous American version of Brexit, if he were somehow elected a second time. My uncle's an avid Fox News/Newsmax watcher, and had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that people don't necessarily vote for the "best" candidate. Instead, they vote for the candidate who is "least bad" and do the minimum amount of damage to their interests. It is always a matter of compromise.
As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.
I mean this is essentially the same situation anyone is in when they have vendor lock in, they know it's a problem, but it is always just not worth it to get out, only this vendor lock in is all vendors from a country lock in and now it is not just worth it but imperative, absolutely necessary.
And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.
The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.
1) Most US citizens don't care for what's happening right now. That's why there's people protesting while armed in major cities.
2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.
People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.
It's fun to think about what Minitel might have become if it had been born when today's Leopards Eating People's Faces Party had been in power, rather than the early 80's when Silicon Valley was dunking on everybody. It was way ahead of its time.
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.
We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.
>We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement.
How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.
Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
Due to the way Microsoft does sales to enterprises, there’s no incentive for its software to be any good or even compete directly with anyone else… as long as it ticks the right boxes, the people making purchasing decisions are fine with it (it’s bundled in with something critical like Excel anyway).
If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.
This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.
I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.
Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.
I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.
> The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.
Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.
Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this
> In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.
I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.
Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.
Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.
Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.
Early 2000s is exactly the time period when telecommunications companies in Europe were well on their way to privatization, if not already fully privatized.
Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?
lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.
What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.
Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.
And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).
There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).
We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.
Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
>I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams.
Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.
It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.
Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?
In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?
Look I am all for Euro-skepticism, but "boycotting the best products" on an article about Microsoft Teams which is well known to be clawing its way into companies despite very negative feedback due to advantageous pricing when you are integrated with Office 365 (which is itself monopolistic behavior). Is not one.
The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.
In no world are Teams and Zoom anywhere close to the "best products". They're awful, and only persist because of network effects or because of "the people who buy it don't feel the pain".
Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.
The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.
But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.
Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents.
The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.
It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.
Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.
We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.
As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.
Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.
America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.
Latest leaks indicate the US will be given sovereignty over its existing and future bases in Denmark, along with oil drilling rights, at $0 to US tax payers. Some vassal indeed.
Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc...
Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:
> Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.
> As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.
Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).
Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/
Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook
Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
I am certainly not going to complain about more well-funded FOSS software being out there.
Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.
Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.
've been using the docs tool in my homelab for ~3 months now as a knowledge base for some projects I've been working on with some friends.
It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.
I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.
Refreshing and impressive indeed. I wish other governments did this, esp those that are larger / have a reasonably large tech scene (e.g. Northern Europe, Nordic, AUS, Japan, Canada, Germany, India, etc).
It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.
I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.
Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.
Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy.
Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.
Hmmm not entirely true. The text chat of their suite is simply element.io (matrix) and they're paying them for development.
Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.
0% chance of working out
Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you.
France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)
>For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does
I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.
The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.
EU finally starts investing in software when it becomes obsolete
Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.
Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.
> get something even worse than Teams
I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.
I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.
This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)
How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.
One day they will discover threaded conversions.
What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably copy text from messages. The mobile app logs you out randomly. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
> and lag constantly on modern hardware
This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
Wrote up a few of my gripes on here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45933952
It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.
It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.
The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.
Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.
I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me.
The new Outlook app is horrible though.
They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here.
The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.
Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.
A lot of companies already have Teams included in their existing licenses.
But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.
You kids have it easy.
Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.
Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.
Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.
And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.
I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.
I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.
By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.
Why would they do that? So annoying.
It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?
As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
> I don't need one app to do everything half-assed
That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."
Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.
Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.
It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.
Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.
If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
It’s not why your big corp chooses teams and the msft suite. From a corp perspective they don’t care about your edge case. There’s only - is it good for 90% of my use cases across the enterprise? And - do I get a bundle discount? Last but not the least - do I need to expend developer resources on it vs anything else?
Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.
Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.
If you don’t want a half assed simulacra version, shouldn’t you prefer Teams open the native application?
For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software
The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop
Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
> Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office
A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.
It is 100% that bad.
Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.
Okay and what exactly does this integration bring?
- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;
- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;
- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.
Am I missing anything?
There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud
If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.
Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".
Just goes to show how many structural problems there are to starting tech companies in Europe.
Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.
There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.
That seems to be the intention of https://mosa.cloud/
I had an occasion to speak to some of the wire.com people a couple years ago. They seemed to be really dedicated to security and privacy.
> to sell support and customization of open source software to government players
Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
Yeah, this is a win/win opportunity and could drive more sponsorship of those projects as there'd be more interests invested in seeing them thrive.
Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.
Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…
This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population.
I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.
As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
> and no significant large technology companies
I can only assume this is a comparison to the US
The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.
Bigger is not always better
Sure, but at least you have homegrown car companies. They make cutting edge cars that are mainstream, and even popular abroad.
You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.
Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.
You say stuff like this, and then simultaneously complain when the US winds up owning the entire technology stack and being the predominate western superpower.
So which is it? Does scale not matter, or are you unhappy with the outcome of ignoring it?
>and no significant large technology companies
I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.
That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.
Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.
> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap
Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".
OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.
That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive. It was the right call, by the US, to put things in this way, but the European disadvantage is not for technical merits.
> This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive.
Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.
I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.
And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.
In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.
Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.
> which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.
I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software, nor is being a majority contributor. These things are very obvious to anyone that regularly works with FOSS in a professional capacity.
The problem is not ownership. It's dev force. We're not bad here in europe, not bad at all.
It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)
Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs.
EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.
As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.
> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.
I am French. When I look at the EU I see great potentials but the effect is a huge bureaucratic mess that is advantageous for everyone involved.
About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.
There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.
With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.
We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.
The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.
leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies
When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).
The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)
Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.
This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.
I have nothing to add other than that you put my argument perfectly, much better than I could. Policy and regulation are the failures.
Yup. Culturally, the EU has favored more regulations over supporting more tech growth to an absurd degree.
Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.
But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.
Europe's main strategy these days seems to be blaming others instead of looking at themselves.
For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.
They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.
They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.
At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.
You are framing this as moral blame. It isn't about that. It is about strategic risk.
Why would we blame the US for our own inability to build a viable software industry? Europe has been painfully aware for years that this is self-inflicted.
The reason there is now serious talk about reducing dependence on the US is not resentment, it is risk. Dependence used to be a convenience. It is increasingly a liability. Trust in long-term stability, rule continuity, and alignment of interests is no longer something we can assume. That changes the calculus, regardless of who is "at fault".
From the perspective of someone who works in software, I’m glad this conversation is finally happening. It’s not about assigning blame. It is about taking responsibility for capabilities we should never have outsourced so completely in the first place.
If this looks like blame from the outside, that’s a misunderstanding of what self-correction looks like.
There's plenty of chatter these days that Europe needs to be more independent from other powers, needs to be more competitive and so on.
What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.
* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.
>>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.
People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings. Prices levels do not come down without a depression, even if inflation slows. Their only solution is wages going up. Do they have a mechanism to push wages up? Taxes must go up, they have been too low for too long and the debt has accumulated (~$38T in US treasuries alone) and will need to be paid back or defaulted on. Insurance costs continue to rise due to rapidly increasing costs of materials and labor, as well as climate change (the US is currently spending ~$1B/year on climate driven events). Growth is over because the US population is not growing (tangentially, total fertility rate is below replacement rate in more than half of countries in the world, and this trend will continue). 401ks predicated on the S&P500 are held up by AI investment (which is outpacing consumer spending, the primary driver of the US economy, over the last year to the tune of ~$400B) and the Mag 7. When this stalls, everyone is going to be sad and not feel as wealthy as they did previously (“wealth effect”).
Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.
Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026
(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)
> Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings.
This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Politics is completely driven by uncritical "just so" narratives. The people pushing the discourse never check or justify their assumptions with actual data. This is the real issue.
> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Which begs the question: does democracy still work when voters are so easily misled? I don’t believe that the current generation is fundamentally more or less intelligent than the previous ones. Is technology to blame for disseminating misinformation too rapidly for us to cope?
The early American system was never designed to function as a pure democracy. The founders were openly skeptical of direct rule by popular will, fearing volatility, mob psychology, and the tendency for short-term emotional reactions to override long-term stability. Instead, they constructed a layered federal republic intended to filter public opinion through successive levels of deliberation.
In the original structure, the public directly elected members of the House of Representatives. This chamber was meant to serve as the immediate voice of the population — responsive, numerous, and frequently subject to elections. It represented popular sentiment but was intentionally balanced by slower, more insulated institutions.
The Senate originally functioned as that stabilizing counterweight. Senators were selected by state legislatures rather than direct vote. This meant they were accountable primarily to the governments of sovereign states rather than transient public passions. The Senate therefore protected state interests, ensured continuity of policy, and acted as a brake on sudden shifts in national mood. The 17th Amendment, which later established direct election of senators, fundamentally altered this federal balance by shifting the Senate toward popular representation rather than state representation.
The presidency was also designed to be buffered from direct democratic selection. The Electoral College was not merely a ceremonial intermediary. Electors were expected to exercise independent judgment and represent state-level deliberation. The system assumed electors would be politically informed individuals capable of evaluating candidates beyond campaign popularity or mass persuasion. In theory, this created a safeguard against demagogues or candidates elevated purely through public excitement.
The vice presidency was structured differently from modern expectations. Originally, the candidate receiving the second highest number of electoral votes became vice president. This design forced cooperation between rival factions and ensured that dissenting political voices remained inside executive governance rather than entirely excluded from power. Although this sometimes created tension, it reflected a belief that competing perspectives strengthened stability.
Underlying these mechanisms was a broader philosophy: governance should incorporate public input while filtering it through layers of institutional judgment. The founders feared what they called “tyranny of the majority,” where temporary popular consensus could override minority rights, long-term national interests, or constitutional boundaries.
Advocates of restoring earlier structural features often argue that modern reforms unintentionally removed stabilizing mechanisms. They contend that direct election of senators nationalized political incentives, encouraging senators to prioritize national party platforms over state-specific interests. Similarly, modern expectations that presidential electors must follow popular vote outcomes arguably transformed the Electoral College from a deliberative body into a procedural formality.
From this viewpoint, reintroducing intermediary decision makers could theoretically slow political volatility, encourage more qualified candidate evaluation, and strengthen federalism by returning power to state governments. However, proponents of such reforms often acknowledge that intermediary systems would require strong transparency, accountability standards, and anti-corruption safeguards. Without those protections, layered elector systems could risk elite capture or reduced public legitimacy.
Critics of restoring these structures typically argue that expanded direct voting increased democratic legitimacy, voter participation, and political equality. They often contend that intermediary systems historically enabled exclusion and reduced accountability to the general population.
The debate therefore centers on a classic governance tradeoff: stability and deliberation versus direct popular sovereignty. The original American constitutional framework leaned toward stability through representation filters, while modern reforms have leaned toward expanding direct electoral influence.
> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
> Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
https://youtu.be/ToJxd3HBviE
Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.
Talk to actual Trump voters and you'll see they support his tariffs and immigration crackdowns because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community. They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them. Even though that's totally backwards, and Trump is just making everything worse, that's what they believe.
Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.
> because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community.
Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.
70 million Americans voted for him. His biggest demographic win compared to the last election was non-white men.
Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.
To the contrary! They were tricked to believe that they were part of society. They aren't. By voting for Trump they reassured themselves that it won't happen to them. Often times racism against the newest group of immigrants coming from the group of immigrants before them is seen by the latter as a rite of passage to be accepted into US society.
The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today. Now they are seen as white but before WWI they weren't seen as white by the WASPs. And it's totally normal for some of the second or third generation immigrants to become racist against new immigrants. Rite of passage.
> The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today
To your earlier point: Boston racism is now legendary (see Celtics fan)
It's zero-sum thinking, "the pie isn't big enough and can't get bigger and I'm afraid, so I'm going to hurt other people so that I don't get hurt".
Yes. And they still remember where they are coming from and they fear that they might again lose their piece of the pie to the groups that are considered more "American", so they feel the need to prove their place in society by cheering the leader who is preaching that the pie is getting smaller and that someone has to leave the table. This fear is handed down over generations and for some families or communities it transforms into hatred. This mechanism is very often played by amoral populists because it works so well.
Many of the most disgusting and radical Democracy hating people in Trumps inner circle are Catholics by the way. Go figure.
Notable and recent: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clym85ev64lo
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy.
> "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong country again."
...
> One poll, from Pew, suggested that 93% of Latinos who cast their votes for Trump rated the economy as their primary issue, with violent crime and immigration trailing far behind.
> Data from the new CBS poll shows that a significant majority of Latinos - 61% - disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, while 69% disapprove of his handling of inflation. The vast majority said they judge the performance of the US economy through prices.
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024
Did he just wake up from a coma?
The dems are just as corrupt, just wiith a nicer smile. Eu citizen, here - all politicians are bent. Anecdata: Anyone who votes for a politician should stfu, stop complaining and live with it. Why should i suffer alone? Disenfranchised? Not me - idgaf. I just hope the eu gets its act together and actually does something, but it will be difficult; language alone, being one of them, and "my pie", another.
>"They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them"
Well it fucking is. But thinking that current king can fix it is a lunacy
What was the alternative? More of the previous administration?
People should have spoken up in town hall meetings and protest on the streets years ago. Now it's a bit too late, but better late than never. Americans rather sit on the couch, watch TV or be absorbed by their smartphone than to go out to their representatives and demand accountability. Instead they "shit" on every institution and person who seems to fight for justice and liberty. You get what you deserve guys. You can't vote with your wallet. You have to try to get to those people in power IN PERSON and pressure them. That's the only thing they understand.
You know what the most effective instrument of power is? Distance. The rich and powerful distance themselves physically from the people, so the demands, worries, accusations, questions etc can't reach them.
The reality in 2024 was that yes, the alternative was more of the previous administration.
Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.
The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.
What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.
I prefer to live by the adage of actions speak louder than words. I’m capable of lying to present a facade, and I have to assume others are too.
You're pretty representative of why Republicans can't stand Democrats. They make wild accusations about everything being rooted in "white supremacy", present themselves as intellectual superiors (as if a significant portion of the Democrat voting block isn't full of similarly poor and uneducated people), demand compliance with social movements that a significant portion of the population find bizarre and off-putting. And if you complain, "well you're just too stupid to realize this is actually good for you."
Does changing the messaging ever cross the mind of Democrats? No, why would it? The people who vote against them are just stupid, obviously. I mean why do we even let these rubes vote?
Voting for a traitorous convicted felon is why I can't stand federal level Republican voters.
What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).
> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.
If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.
> Voting for a traitorous convicted felon
The Epstein revelations show that pretty much everyone that could make it to the ballot list has skeletons in their closet. The only difference is that some of them manage to hide it better than others.
I doubt that, but in reality, Harris was on the ballot, and was squeaky clean relative to her opposition.
And there's levels of skeletons, but calling up a governor and asking them to find votes and baselessly casting doubts on elections and endorsing and freeing people who attacked the US government is not on the same level of everyone else's skeletons.
> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
If your position is that racism and sexism are the root of the problem — which I am not contesting — how wise do you think it was for the Democrats to try running with a black woman?
Obviously, it was not wise. Hope they don't make the same mistake again.
The Republican party is openly racist. More than it has ever been in the last 40 years! And you are claiming otherwise. You are actively looking the other way if you dismiss this. It's not normal and why should the Democrats copy the Republicans? So they lose the liberal voters who aren't okay with bigotry and revenge politics? Because no matter what the Democrats say, the MAGA Republicans will always beat them at that, and people will still vote for the OG racists anyway.
Your argument is coming up everytime when right-wing populists gain votes, and it's always a fatal trap. Merz in Germany claimed to beat the AfD (who is loved by Bannon and Musk and was loved by Epstein btw, all "wonderful" people), and it failed he barely made it to become chancellor. It also failed in the 90s during the first wave of racism in Germany after re-unification.
Failing to make xenophobic choices when it comes to...enterprise software, is the issue?
The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).
Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.
Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).
How someone voted has almost no bearing on the dangers of tech. The dangers were there before the last election and none of the candidates had strong positions regarding tech privacy. Microsoft would still be doing what it has been doing regardless of the election outcome. I wouldnt hold my breath that a European Teams/Zoom replacement will have robust encryption and privacy protection based on all the backdoor stuff I've heard being pushed in some European countries.
Many of us see them and are fighting the fight if our lives against it
The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.
A reminder that in the last presidential election, the winner was decided by one of the smallest margins ever, and the winner only won a plurality, not a majority.
Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).
Almost as many, but not more than :)
I remember a conversation I had with my uncle before the 2024 election during which I told him Donald Trump's leadership would result in a no-less-disastrous American version of Brexit, if he were somehow elected a second time. My uncle's an avid Fox News/Newsmax watcher, and had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
I do not think many U.S. citizens were consulted on the decision to blow up Nordstream.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that people don't necessarily vote for the "best" candidate. Instead, they vote for the candidate who is "least bad" and do the minimum amount of damage to their interests. It is always a matter of compromise.
As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.
I mean this is essentially the same situation anyone is in when they have vendor lock in, they know it's a problem, but it is always just not worth it to get out, only this vendor lock in is all vendors from a country lock in and now it is not just worth it but imperative, absolutely necessary.
And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.
The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.
1) Most US citizens don't care for what's happening right now. That's why there's people protesting while armed in major cities.
2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.
People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.
The French have created Mintel. May the world tremble.
It's a shame the Americans don't see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Why did the French never follow up and improve Minitel?
It's fun to think about what Minitel might have become if it had been born when today's Leopards Eating People's Faces Party had been in power, rather than the early 80's when Silicon Valley was dunking on everybody. It was way ahead of its time.
Being Great doesnt comes with Best to Live with, Best to Work with, Best to make Business with etc...
US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)
As an American, this is awesome to see.
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.
From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.
We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.
Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.
>We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement.
How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
Israel GPT, generate me a comment.
After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.
Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
Due to the way Microsoft does sales to enterprises, there’s no incentive for its software to be any good or even compete directly with anyone else… as long as it ticks the right boxes, the people making purchasing decisions are fine with it (it’s bundled in with something critical like Excel anyway).
If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.
This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.
I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.
Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.
I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.
> The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.
Ahhh, collaboration via Visio. Those were the days!
Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.
Yes, and it's clear European governments are just catching up to the sentiment of European people.
Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.
You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.
It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company
Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this
The first sentence of the article:
> In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.
I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.
Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.
Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.
Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.
Early 2000s is exactly the time period when telecommunications companies in Europe were well on their way to privatization, if not already fully privatized.
You are proving my point.
Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.
Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?
Where are the businesses setting up and donating to an organization/foundation to pay for development of such a package?
Aside from email I think nextcloud (+ jitsi integration) covers most, if not all, of those requirements.
Nextcloud is great !
Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment.
Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.
lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.
What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.
Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.
And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).
There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).
We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.
Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
>I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams.
Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.
It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.
Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?
Isn't it reasonable to block access to countries that deny you the option to compete and copy your business?
Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.
Should US businesses block all connections from countries which deny them the option to compete?
Does it matter whether a competitor in such a country is copying their business while they are denied the option to compete?
In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?
Look I am all for Euro-skepticism, but "boycotting the best products" on an article about Microsoft Teams which is well known to be clawing its way into companies despite very negative feedback due to advantageous pricing when you are integrated with Office 365 (which is itself monopolistic behavior). Is not one.
The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.
In no world are Teams and Zoom anywhere close to the "best products". They're awful, and only persist because of network effects or because of "the people who buy it don't feel the pain".
The best products like Microsoft Teams? Let's be honest, a lot of the software they've replaced has a checkered past
This is a great reason to invest in open-source software.
it’s gotta be too good to be true, but at least one major economy taking the lead, imagine
Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.
The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.
But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.
Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
The absence of war in Europe is more down to the EU than the US. Polls do not consistently show anything of the sort.
EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents.
The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.
Long time overdue. It is so stupid to rely on a single country in so many areas
[dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)
For Teams-like chat I really like Zulip. Which also integrates with Jitsi for video conferencing
If you are hosting webinars there's also bigbluebutton
It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.
Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.
(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)
This one is often overlook but very good, I prefer it over Jitsi https://galene.org/
The French government built their own: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
"built their own" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product)
But you can see:
> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)
Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.
Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.
If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.
But they hosted the repo on Microsoft-run GitHub ...
The public-facing mirror :-)
Jitsi? https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
I guess Jitsi?
https://www.rocket.chat/
We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.
The Jitsi site says rocket.chat uses it.
Imo this was inevitable even without Trump. He just massively accelerated it.
The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.
As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.
Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.
America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.
Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US.
Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Latest leaks indicate the US will be given sovereignty over its existing and future bases in Denmark, along with oil drilling rights, at $0 to US tax payers. Some vassal indeed.
Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc...
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive...
Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i...
> Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.
https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa...
> As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.
Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right...
A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...
If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.