Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
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@anttipeltola I share your values, but the issue in that plan is that big moonshots and major technical improvements need multi year huge investments at loss. And that requires a company with a big enough budget that it can afford that loss.
So if we don’t want big techs we need to find another model to fund big moonshots.
Most of the open-source software you are using was built with little to no external funding. Mainly volunteer work. Giving a few million EUR grants to these projects is nothing for European governments.
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Most of the open-source software you are using was built with little to no external funding. Mainly volunteer work. Giving a few million EUR grants to these projects is nothing for European governments.
@anttipeltola I am an open source maintainer myself. Even on some projects with significant funding. “Volunteer work” is not a sustainable model. I maintain OSS software in my spare time and when I have the energy to do so. But that’s not what pays my bills and I honestly know zero OSS maintainers that are able to live decently purely on donations
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Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
No gods. No masters.
@anttipeltola something German/Scandinavian would be good. Well designed and built, decentralized by nature, green in intent and inherently nonviolent. Tech as public utility. Not for profit.
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Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
No gods. No masters.
@anttipeltola I agree. A problem with very big companies I see is that they're hard to regulate. Another is that they tend to not serve the people using them. An ecosystem with a small number of very big players seems inherently less healthy and less likely to cope with disasters than one with many players of different size, which can still collaborate.
Very, very large projects are easier for very, very big players. But still possible by collaboration among smaller players.
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@anttipeltola I agree. A problem with very big companies I see is that they're hard to regulate. Another is that they tend to not serve the people using them. An ecosystem with a small number of very big players seems inherently less healthy and less likely to cope with disasters than one with many players of different size, which can still collaborate.
Very, very large projects are easier for very, very big players. But still possible by collaboration among smaller players.
@liw @anttipeltola I'm working in a regulated industry (telecommunications) that mandates open standards and interoperability and let's say that never caused trouble.
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Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
No gods. No masters.
@anttipeltola one point I've repeatedly raised with lawmakers is that if we just build European big tech, then it risks being acquired and we'll be back to square one.
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Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
No gods. No masters.
@anttipeltola @otfrom I think Cory Doctorow has the right idea - enforce standards to make the tech interoperable (the software equivalent of the USB-C mandate) and encourage competition.
And beef up the anti-monopoly enforcement so that each country can foster multiple organisations.
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@Dialectician @anttipeltola That's why patents were invented. They are far from perfect but the idea is not bad: "you can get the business benefit of your research for a few years, but then you have to share it with the rest of the community"
That model is not terrible, it's the implementation that so far is lacking
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@anttipeltola something German/Scandinavian would be good. Well designed and built, decentralized by nature, green in intent and inherently nonviolent. Tech as public utility. Not for profit.
@jaymoore @anttipeltola and open. Anything should be FOSS and pledge never change that, with no venture capital and strict control of other sources of funding.
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Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
No gods. No masters.
@anttipeltola One of the steps I keep hoping for is absolutely no government contracts for something where there aren't at least two independent interoperable products or services which are completely independent implementations of the open protocols or standards.
So if you want to sell a support contract for office software, the office software has to be one of at least two implementations which are (testably! in great detail, testably!) equivalent implementations of the open standard.
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