I'll believe it when I see it. It'll probably take 1-2 decades before the majority of companies have cut the cord. Many people I talked to expected the government to make the first step, not industry which seems completely backwards but oh well.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Why backwards? Seems like governments should respond to the will of the people, whereas companies make decisions in their own interest based on profit. You could say customers vote with their money. Or you could pass laws requiring regulations to drive such a shift. But ultimately that would all take longer than simply passing laws to change how the government spends on IT and services?
Companies are supposed to be the nimble ones, not the government. Most of the time it's companies that drive adoption of something, not governments. Governments are normally the slowest at adopting anything that makes sense.
To now turn it around and say "no, we will wait until the government adopts the tech" is backwards.
Companies are supposed to be the nimble ones, not the government.
Unfortunately that's just propaganda, similar to "private companies keep costs low"
Migrations are extremely costly for businesses, they'd likely need a legal or fiscal reason to do so.
The countries have a lot of personal information about the citizens and I think a majority of the population wishes that the data about them are stored and handled securely and that other countries do not have access to it. And the government itself doesn't want their mails and stored data to be available for foreign interest, which it is if the data is stored at AWS, Google or Microsoft. So I think the governments and the citizens all around Europe should have a lot of interest in changing to European solutions.
Some European government departments have already switched. The government is leading because they want digital sovereignty and they handle both sensitive government information and sensitive people's information. Companies will just go for profit unless required to do something else, and only certain companies will ever need to switch when they handle sensitive data. Your mom and pop flower store doesn't matter. Also they need European cloud companies to get rolling, which means they need customers, and the easiest and best customer is the government, which means it makes sense for the government to lead. You have this all backwards.
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
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Americans have done everything better than anyone else
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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.
Really hoping they do. The EU is a huge market, and it will have a downstream effect and potentially force positive change in the US if they consume less from us.
Better half a century late than never!
re:title: Who used my Santa wish list as a primary source again?!
The article goes on about "would be nice if"s. Call me back when the EU sets some meaningful financial/legal incentives to move away from US hyper-dependance by default.
Isn’t palantir making deals all over Europe?
Does it. 99% are using AWS, Google or Microsoft to the best of my knowledge.
AWS is even trying to bluewash their crap with https://aws.eu/ -- should have launched in 2025 but doesn't seem like they're getting there.