This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's not so much that Europe wants to ditch US tech.
It's more that everyone wants to ditch the current crop of leeching billionaires and their spyware products. It's just they all happen to be in the US which given its current administration is a problem.
However this push to use more open source and locally based alternatives proceeds Donald Trump's first term. It's just his rhetoric has accelerated the process.
"3,000 people across the three countries" are ready to ditch us tech.
Is this not everybody?
i stopped reading when i saw that
Good. Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS, because right now it’s down to Apple and Google, both from the US.
Linux is a great place to start. Android is based on Linux. Even a fork of Android that doesn’t give Google any data would be a good place to start, but relying on AOSP — Google’s open source repository — isn’t ideal.
Graphene and e/OS exist.
Problem with Graphene is the limitation of hardware to Pixel due to manufacturers.
e/OS is good, but the missing killer app for me is contactless payment. Which brings Europe back to the Visa/MC problem. Digital Euro could fix this.
Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS
Damn funny me thinking about Symbian and the fallen empires of Nokia and Ericsson, now that the ball is in EU's court as enshittification consumes America and the Chinese government likes to have its presence in nearly every device ever made from the Middle Kingdom.
You would have the same trouble Microsoft did though. No one wanted to use the Windows mobile because there were no apps for it, and there were no apps for it because no developers wanted to develop for a platform with no users. Chicken and the egg.
It would be nice to have a smartphone that was just web-based and didn't really have apps, but I think that ship has sailed, people are just used to the concept and I think they would think of it as a step backwards if they had a phone that didn't use apps.
I'd say the priority should be to have hardware that allows changing the os, just like pcs. We already have a lot of functional mobile OSes, but with locked hardware, we're still stuck with google and apple
To give a bit of technical details, the hardware must have a feature to destroy encryption keys for user data whenever a new OS is installed on it; and you have to be able to install a new OS on it at all.
Like, today, many smartphones have the problem that you can't install a new OS on them at all, because the bootloader doesn't allow it. Meanwhile PCs have a different problem, where they do allow installing new OS, but the user data is typically not encrypted and so you can just boot linux from a USB device and read all contents on the internal disk.
The best solution might be to encrypt all userdata, store the keys in the bootloader on the device, but when a new OS is loaded/installed, the bootloader doesn't give out the keys so the userdata can't be decrypted.
not sure about ready... sure there's a will
Not even sure there is that much will on politicians side. I hope there is, but they are mostly ignorant (judging from politicians in my country) and wouldn't distinguish between Word and Windows. They might be interested if there are elections and public pushes for it. But once elected then it's another song based on US stick and carrot. Mostly sticks from this administration. But I really do hope we start to move and now is the best time possible. Also recently there was data that German Federal Administration is paying Microsoft something like:
2023: 274.091.361,75 Euro
2024: 347.665.579,71 Euro
2025: 481.369.660,77 Euro
The trend is not encouraging, isn't it, and those are insane numbers - imagine what could we have for that amount with OSS. There is another neglected area - computer education in elementary school is practically non-existent and tiny-existent in middle school in my country while MS is subsidizing software for government and specially education sector. And so the circle of is closed.
are those millions? am I reading that right?
yes, german has a very weird way of writing numbers, where . is replaced by , and , is replaced by .
So, in US numbers, that would be EUR 274,091,361.75
It has confused many people already. It should be made more consistent internationally. I propose all use the US format of 274,091,361.75 because that's already used in programming and so it's widespread.
"Very weird way of writing numbers"
You mean like in all of Europe (excluding UK and Ireland) and latin America? It's only english speaking countries and some Asian countries that separate with ,
Your eyesight is 20/20
Eu might ditch some us software. Highly doubt that it will respect your privacy though, more and more countries here are pushing id-verification for social media and other stuff
No thanks proton ,prefer mailbox , posteo and mullvad