this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
270 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
4482 readers
11 users here now
Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.
Rules
PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!
- Be civil and no prejudice
- Don't promote big-tech software
- No apathy and defeatism for privacy (i.e. "They already have my data, why bother?")
- No reposting of news that was already posted
- No crypto, blockchain, NFTs
- No Xitter links (if absolutely necessary, use xcancel)
Related communities:
Some of these are only vaguely related, but great communities.
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !selfhosting@slrpnk.net / !selfhosted@lemmy.world
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Leaders: (to US) Were serious! Don't make us cut this cord! We'll do it........ We will do it......... Don't try to stop us.... Don't try and talk a out of it.....
European Citizens: (to their elected leaders) For goodness sake, cut it now, ASAP, and let us be free of those risks.
Anyone still relying on services or resources from the united States is seriously mentally ill or a saboteur.
Or y'know this stuff takes time.
It's been a year and shit wasn't great before that.
A year is nothing, I've seen changes to backend data sources, all internal, where the new data source is superior and everyone wants the change to happen take 12+ years (and counting). That's nothing compared to the changes that would be required for the continued seamless operation of a country or even a large corp, much of the required software/documentation/processes won't even exist yet.
Valid, but it wasn't sane for the previous 8 years, and the threat is substantial.
Don't get me wrong, I do think independence is a good thing and should happen faster, I'd go as far as to say almost every penny spent by governments across Europe (including UK/Norway/Switzerland) on proprietary software is shameful.
I'm fairly certain if European govts got together and spent one year's MS Office budget funding an open source Office suite for instance - LibreOffice would be on another level.
In reality we're probably at the feasibility study stage for most (if anything is being done at all).
I just don't think we need to start bandying about terms like "seriously mentally ill" or the hyperbole of "saboteur"
Again, the problem is worsened under the current regime, but american tech has had a severe end enshittification/usability problem for a while now, and trump normalized some very shady crap in his first term, which started last decade.
The idea that a single piece of American commercial software will still be usable by 2031 is optimistic.
Tbh this kind of hyperbole makes you come across as deeply unserious, the kind of argument that sets back any argument for OSS being used.
You're ignoring the relatively stable Biden years in between, if Haris had won I doubt we'd be having this conversation.
Things are substantially worse under this regime than the first. Governments mostly don't flip their entire IT and digital infrastructure planning on a whim. The three major governments on the continent haven't even been particularly stable over the last 4 years to push through this kind of change.
Earlier this year is the first time the general public have started feeling vulnerable to an unpredictable actor. That's when govt might do something about it, I'm not sure any have a particular mandate for digital sovereignty. I'm speaking here as someone who has regularly petitioned govt to use more OSS over the last 20 odd years.
Funds need allocating, teams built out (what you're suggesting is a huge enterprise), a plan, all that would take years before any practical implementation. They're also not going to abandon existing contracts, that would be a catastrophic waste of public finds.
Take the rollout of the encompass health software in Northern Ireland, 18 months for go-live of a prebuilt well understood piece of software. That doesn't include any of the preliminary planning work or testing. Small population, relatively few hospitals - a relatively small job. What you're suggesting is decades of work without a wartime-esque effort.
I'm suggesting that it should be a 'wartime-esque' effort
And biden put on a better face, but the industry's been heading this way for a while. The software is just fucking shit on its own and using consumer commitment to keep profits up. No government required. American shit has been at the bleeding edge of enshittification.
The problem can be witnessed every time just about anyone seriously considers moving away from American products in the software space. They will notice that generally
Americans have done everything better than anyone else
Americans have done everything cheaper than anyone else
Which means that a significant change to EU-made stuff means that you will pay more for something that is worse. It takes a lot of commitment to some pretty much non-existant EU ideal to do that. And before Trump (especially the second term), nobody in EU really had any good reason to do it. USA was genuinely a good ally in just about every level.
There's FOSS versions of most things, which are often quite good, sometimes better than commercial product, and almost always cheaper. For example: even 15 years ago when windows had a usable consumer OS and Linux was rougher, it was a better enterprise OS if you didn't need AutoCAD or Photoshop.
Also, why not pirate? I know that doesn't work for everything, but it works for some things.
This is valid but the advice doesn't scale.
Enterprises have very complex needs, and they generally aren't going to pirate anything.
They paid for WinZip?
I've met some pretty shady sysadmins in my day.
Yeah I thought about Linux as a possible counter-example, then I realized that a significant amount of the maintenance burden of Linux as an operating system has been carried by American companies.
FOSS in general too, but a lot of that has also been done by american individuals either by themselves or backed by their employers.
And of course Linus Torvalds moved from Finland to America of all the places he could've chosen.
There are Americans who contribute, but they don't own the product; nobody does.