Categories missing:

- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads

- Programming language toolchains

- Hardware vendors

Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?

Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.

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pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Only if there are European resources to keep the lights on.

Java is FOSS by the way, however it is also a good example, its runtime capabilities isn't the product of long nights and weekends.

	▲	ben_w 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Keeping the lights on is sufficient for the immediate concerns. We can worry about feature growth later, if at all. It may be age finally changing my preferences, but so much of what I've seen sold as "new" in tech in recent years has been either worse than what I already had or a reinvention of something that already existed. Like, contactless payments were already a thing before they were available in phones, and social media didn't start with FB and twitter, and Apple's API updates in the last few years feel like as much of a downgrade to me as their icons seem to be to UI blogs.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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jimnotgym 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.

Hardware vendors is a different issue

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pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.

Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?

For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.

As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.

Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.

EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.

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nitwit005 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People are still running on Java 1.8, which was released in 2014. If no more Java work happened, that'd be unfortunate, but realistically we'd all be fine.

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jimnotgym 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be?

On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.

	▲	jimnotgym 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Edit: I concede my .net concerns do pull through to Linux. If you were selling Linux solutions to Government or big business, I fear Redhat might be chosen before Suse and Ubuntu

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direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The EU is asking for information on how to support open source, as they currently do through NLNET. It seems to prefer decentralised open source to the hyper-capitalism we got from American tech. Both have their downsides, of course.

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badsectoracula 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually.

Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For the same reason people on the wrong countries aren't allowed to contribute to US projects.

The way things are going it becomes a national security issue where those PR are coming from.

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badsectoracula 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So, to be clear, your reasons for looking for EU alternatives (i.e. that "same reason" you refer to) is that some countries are not allowed to contribute to US projects?

	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, as it stands we should remove our independence on US, given current geopolitics, when technology can be weaponised.

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BenoitEssiambre 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For consumers, these computers look interesting: https://starlabs.systems/

	▲	qznc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I recently discovered these: https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/

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gtirloni 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register

	▲	pjmlp 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks

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dismalaf 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.

Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.

Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.