I’m quite confused when I hear my fellow European citizens worry about our dependence on American Big Tech, and that in case America goes full Nazi we have no way of building our future.
American Big Tech is overwhelmingly dependent on free and open-source software that is overwhelmingly built and maintained by volunteers on both sides of the pond.
From the Linux kernel that powers basically all the large servers in the world, to the most popular distros built around that kernel, to the most popular database systems (MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB…) and messaging systems (Redis, Kafka…), to Elastic (based in Amsterdam), to Blender (also based in Amsterdam), to all the open programming languages that power today’s world (Rust, PHP, Python [also invented by a Dutch developer], Kotlin [developed by JetBrains, also headquartered in Amsterdam]), to the Web servers that serve most of the content (nginx, Apache…), to the Grafana+Loki+Prometheus+OTEL stack that makes the backbone of observability in most of today’s large companies, to the numpy+pandas libraries that are the backbone of all of today’s AI hype, large American companies could do NOTHING, and I mean literally NOTHING, without open-source software that is built out of collaborations between European and American developers (who are often unpaid and on the verge of burnout).
If you want a glimpse of today’s technological avantgarde, you don’t have to go to flashy and hollow events like ESC in Las Vegas, or any Silicon Valley sponsored event. You have to go to FOSDEM in Belgium.
American Big Tech has the ability of putting together these freely available building blocks, building finished products with them, monetizing them aggressively through unethical business models, funding them through some of the richest men in the world (because the VC world is still dominated only by rich white men), locking them up as services that run into their private clouds (companies like AWS literally fill up bottles with free tap water and make outrageous amounts of money by renting access to that water), and sucking up generous subsidies from the federal government, while the EU gives literally peanuts to those building this infrastructure - we had to wait for years and beg the commission before getting something like Next Generation Internet up and running, which provides these projects with literally 0.01% of the money that the US has provided to its already deep-pocketed giants through things like the CHIPS act, and we also have to periodically send them letters like this https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI# to make sure that we don’t lose even those peanuts.
Imagine what we could build in Europe if only we had coherent technological programs that just funded the talent that we already have.
Imagine what we could do if instead of a couple of millions of spare change (and Von der Leyen never putting her wallet where her mouth is, because if we had one million every time she said “EU 🩷 open-source” all the EU-based volunteers on Github will be millionaire by now) we had even a fraction of the funding of acts like CHIPS.
Imagine what we could do if European companies firmly grounded in the values of open-source and ethical business models (like Nextcloud or Blender) had enough funding to compete with the American giants, instead of having to hear technologically illiterate megalomaniacs like Draghi and Macron argue for “European champions” that simply mock the unsustainable and unethical business models championed by America.
Our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic lately are going a bit nuts (like Nazi nuts). It’s time to start decoupling and de-riskifying from them, nurturing our own sustainable open-source ecosystem, and, if they start leveraging their own Big Tech as a weapon against us, pull the drawbridge and cut them out of the European open-source software that runs their servers.
In a world where code and data are the new oil, access to open-source software means access to the raw materials required to make your industry wealthy. We shouldn’t underestimate that.
@fabio "EU-based volunteers on GitHub" need to get off of Microsoft's GitHub, and onto something more free software and EU-based like Codeberg. It's really easy to move, and Microsoft will then lose access to harvesting their data.
You can't close off access to free software. It belongs to everyone. It's part of the cost of being a free software advocate.
@lwriemen I fully agree on the code forge! Most of my stuff is now on my self-hosted Forgejo server. It didn’t even take much to set up and it doesn’t even require a lot of resources (unlike Gitlab). The big problem with this decentralized approach however is the lack of federation. At the current stage someone who wants to push a PR or open an issue on Platypush needs to create an account on my Forgejo instance. I’d love to be in a world where ActivityPub(-ish) protocols also apply to code forges, so I can use the same account to contribute to repositories that live on different servers, and my contributions to different instances are all visible on my instance, just like replies to accounts on multiple Mastodon instances. Forgejo started working on something like that a while ago, but I’m not sure if there’s been much progress.
About closing up FOSS, of course you can’t “close it up” strictly speaking, but you can sure decide what users can do with it. Same with GPL/AGPL - of course the code is accessible to anyone, but if you decide to redistribute it in a closed format or package it in your own closed cloud and profit from it, you are violating the license.
Of course such constraints aren’t easy to enforce, especially if you end up fighting legal battles against a powerful government, but it’s important to start setting precedents.