Ironically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.

Everyone has been going gung ho about Canadian PM speech but the banger one for me personally is the Belgian PM. He said it best “Being a happy vassal state is one thing, being a miserable slave is another”. Europe deserves every bit what’s coming to them.

I'd imagine this attitude would start to disappear as soon as alternatives start being used. It's already happening to some extent, but it needs to trickle down into the general populace. The relevant names just aren't in people's minds yet (although there definitely are areas where there aren't exact 1-to-1 replacements available).

It’s amazing how complacent and weak-willed the European populace and political leaders are. Quite the contrast to Canada.

Genuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?

Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.

I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.

I think you're misreading the source of the defeatism. It's clear what European leaders should do if they want to compete with US big tech. They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.

To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.

Even if MAGA goes away in 3 years when Trump (hopefully) goes away, the US will remain an oligarchy. Billionaire's interests comes before citizens' interests. This is because of a supreme court decision that allowed billionaires to buy elections. For this reason, even though I am American, I'd like to see European alternatives to US apps and services, because they are more likely to serve my interests.

No they don't... most people just want cheap stuff that works.

UK government standards say that government software should be open source by default https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...

> followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles

Has this actually produced any tangible results?

I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.

I wonder if it would work if the governments provide some tax incentives for open source contributions similar to charity donations as well.

Dane here.

Feelings are different now. IIRC, the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American.

It has become broadly clear, that it is about self preservation.

First time round, Trump would consistently say lots of worrying stuff, but people in the US administration would stop him from following through.

This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.

The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"

The wheels of Eurocrats turn slowly. (That was meant to be bureaucrats but autocorrect won this time. :D )

> Every operating system is in US hands

Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).

> Visa, Mastercard, Paypal

The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while

> all social media commonly used

I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam

This is pretty basic tech to replicate if it's needed though. It wasn't needed before so we just used what was there. But crazy to think the place you spawned from 2k years ago couldn't make another basic payment system if it was important lol.

Open source is basically sovereign (if Russia can use it), so there do exist functional alternatives for most of these things. It's mostly from inertia and network effects that the American ones are used.

Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system and Android app store once they got kicked out of the US-based competitors?

Another opportunity for brunch with the other ministers

Including the US. I don't want to be dependent on this stuff any more than anybody else does.

That would require some hard choices and actual hard work. It’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Maybe?

I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.

Trump is an obvious Russian agent. Stealing money for himself and destroying all western trust is his only goal.

What Europe has got to do with Ukraine? Europe is much more dependent on Russia (for cheap energy resources) than it's on Ukraine, son. Besides, who forced EU to send billions of euros to Ukraine to fuel this pointless war - which only made Europe weaker than ever?