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Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).

Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/

Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/

Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook

Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.

I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.

Grist https://www.getgrist.com/

A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...

Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.

That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.

> in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin.

I don't think it's just that. It's also the increasingly plausible idea that the US government could pressure the EU by actually or threatening to control, throttle or tax EU access to online platforms such as Zoom, Teams, MS Office, Google docs, Azure or AWS.

> in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin

Would you elaborate how this "in fact" is "protecting their citizens' rights"? Very curious to know.

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-co...

> Microsoft, for example, cancelled Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in his home country of the U.K. have been blocked.

I fail to see how that addresses my question

for example EU privacy laws can be ignored in the states with for example the cloud act. having control over software and infrastructure is protecting the rights of eu citizen in that regard.

Microsoft, Google, et al very famously spy on everything you do and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government, regardless of whether the person is a US citizen.

Take this idea one step further. Microsoft, Google, et al also snoop on what foreign governments do with their software and report back to USGov.

> and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government,

Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.

Don’t think that this is a uniquely American property. If your data sits on servers within the control of any company that operates in a country, that country can and will apply legal pressure upon those companies to extract the data.

> Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.

I'm not sure of your point. This is an excellent argument as to why the French government should run their government videoconferencing and chat on infrastructure in France, as they plan to do, isn't it? Using software that they have vetted. Regardless of if this is a "uniquely American" thing or not.

Right. I’m not disagreeing with that. A country should run their official business on tools that aren’t trivially liable for extraction by foreign governments.

The point was in response to the above comment. All governments can and will compel companies to turn over data. It’s often framed on HN as a feature of only American companies but it’s actually universal.

It happens that the major tech platforms are all US-based, so it's more relevant to talk about US government policy than any other. Even if they are all like that.

But, in addition, the US government has recently become more pushy and less friendly than it was before, which is prompting many other nations to re-assess their dependence on the tech of what was until recently a close ally. The headline is an example.

It seems to me more about "this foreign government is most relevant" than "only this foreign government is like that".

That's not the point. Yes, governments are sovereign within their territory. But the US can force any US company to hand over data, regardless of where that company has located the data center.

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?

MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:

  * You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
  * You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
  * You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.

Access is an FE for db — JET Red, specifically.

JET Blue aka ESE is currently used by products like Active Directory and Exchange.

With Access, a business doing data entry could -- with a business user not a software engineer -- craft a Form and voila, easy onboarding to train new employees instead of filling out sheets of paper and filing them.

Access biggest advantage by far was that you could share the file on a network drive and having multiple people accessing it: You didnt need any type of complex backup procedure.

In case of failure, just copy-over the old file from yesterday - such simple solutions are pure gold for SME without any big IT department

If you want forms try https://visualdb.com/ it is another tool that aims to be Microsoft Access

https://nocodb.com/ is an open source alternative.

It has data corruption issues, see https://visualdb.com/blog/concurrencycontrol/

Not open source though?

Right but it is cheaper than open source products if you self-host. Most open source products in this space, including grist, are only partially open source.

[grist employee here] Grist forms are open source and were used to keep the toilets clean at FOSDEM just a few days ago https://fosstodon.org/@grist/116001932837956733

Everything you see in our standard docker image is open source. Yes, you can enable and pay for enterprise features too.

It is weird that your enterprise features are not self-hostable even if a customer pays. I understand if some features are not open source, but why make it not self-hostable? Self-hosting is a requirement for confidential data.

The enterprise features are self-hostable. Look at "your servers" on the pricing page for Grist. Individuals (and orgs with < $1 million in annual income) quality for free activation keys btw.

Form support is touted on the homepage: https://www.getgrist.com/forms/

For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).

Grist forms support uploads since 2025 https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/pull/1655

Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.

Kudos, Grist is great ! Super features, quite seamless only the UI could be more modern (or user stylesheet customizable) if you get to it.

Thanks! Fair about styling :). You can bring your own stylesheet https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/#how-do-i-customiz...

> France is not adopting existing open source software

As a Frenchman, this stings. I have been working since 2017 in creating an open source alternative to Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), the reality is out of 60 customers, only 2 are French and most contacts I've had with French entities only shown interest onto open source because they were not willing to spend a dime on anything.

Customers are mostly US entities and other countries in Europe. The gist is our technology is already working accross every possible storage technology and every identity provider, has a clean modern UI, has gateway capabilities to expose your data with open protocols like SFTP, FTP, S3, MCP, with virtual filesystem capabilities that enables a decentralized approach through federation and tons of other advanced setup, is deployed in production in places like US military, MIT, European Commission and many other othher high profile places.

We just launched https://www.filestash.eu a few days ago hoping to talk to people in France who are interested in translating the talk of data sovereignty onto actual actions. If anybody who is reading this is truly interested onto a sovereign Dropbox and is willing to put talks onto a concrete reality, reach out to me, I'd love to talk to you

This looks interesting. Does it also has desktop sync clients? Didn't read anything in that direction while glancing over.

yes there are a few options there as well

Does Filestash support replication/automated backups and encryption? Also, do you have mobile clients?

Is your filestash.eu website intentionally only in French?

Yes, the international website is: https://www.filestash.app/

I've been using the docs tool in my homelab for ~3 months now as a knowledge base for some projects I've been working on with some friends.

It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.

I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.

I am certainly not going to complain about more well-funded FOSS software being out there.

Hmmm not entirely true. The text chat of their suite is simply element.io (matrix) and they're paying them for development.

Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.

You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the links to hand here.

Tchap (the chat part of the suite) is indeed a fork of Element. Unfortunately they haven't funded upstream development for many years (otherwise both Element and Tchap would be much much better!)

Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.

We do support the foundation: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/dinum-...

Yup, DINUM does support the Matrix Foundation, which is appreciated in terms of helping keeping Matrix itself alive and independent.

However, this doesn't help support the folks improving & maintaining Element (either its clients or servers), which is the actual upstream product that Tchap is dependent on. Just like donating to the W3C doesn't help improve Firefox, if you were operationally dependent on a Firefox fork.

I think it's a very convenient way of framing it and nicely occults how the stewardship at Matrix significantly changed since they chose it for Tchap.

We’re not trying to obscure anything: we very well know that Tchap’s adoption of Matrix and their current support (Foundation membership, code contributions to Element Web, evangelisation to other countries, etc.) are key to our success, and we are very grateful for it.

We’re just stating facts: DINUM stopped funding upstream development at Element in 2022/2023 when their post-COVID funding evaporated, and this then directly contributed to the licensing changes at Element at the end of 2023 (https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/) as we tried to figure out a way to survive (which, thankfully, worked).

But we also know that the Tchap team is very budget constrained internally themselves to keep it running, despite the growing criticality and huge visibility of the service, and are trying to find ways to fix the situation at every level.

This is not a challenge limited to France: the question of how to support the upstream when heavily using open source was one of the top topics of last week’s Open Source Week in Brussels, involving folks at every level in European government.

Oh I thought you said that you were doing custom features for the French government in a comment a few months ago. I must have misunderstood, sorry.

It really has been a huge disappointment the extent to which governments using open source projects for mission critical work go out of their way to avoid financially supporting them.

How much better could open source alternatives to Teams be in this moment if only 1% of what Europe paid Microsoft for Teams went to investing in open alternatives?

It boggles the mind as to why they choose a name for this application that is very clearly a Microsoft trademark.

In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...

If French trademark law is even remotely close to US trademark law, it can't be applied to videoconferencing because you can't apply a trademark that is just the term for the category of product that is covered.

So for example, I can't trademark "Apple" for my apple orchard. But I can trademark it for my computer company. Similarly, MS likely has chart visualization tools covered by "Visio" in France, but not telecommunications software.

Trademarks aren't granted to a company for unrestricted use. They're granted for specific use. Like I can't found a computer company, get Apple trademarked, and then buy an orchard, use Apple for the orchard, and then sue every apple orchard for saying "XYZ Apples" in their name. It remains restricted to a specific use that was included in the initial application for TM.

> Code bases are on GitHub

Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/

If the move away from American big tech is for practical reasons rather than political, there is no harm in using GitHub. The worry with using an American firm is that the US government could force the company to handover confidential information, or shut down access.

For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.

tbh I was always of the mind that Github offers nothing over some slight convenience in hosting and some exposure, in exchange for the loss of control

Github had enough mindshare that for a small dev operation it was a form of social networking on top of actual code revision control, and one could get the occasional PR worth looking at; this consideration has essentially gone away as the amount of unreviewed vibecoded slop has skyrocketed

I know I'm biased but I'd run my own git server

but you're right that security is of no object here if you're code is OSS in the first place

What control do you lose with github that you want to maintain?

For any code you are sharing, I think you are underselling the hosting + sharing convenience. Everyone looks for projects on github, it is what people expect. Hosting it yourself requires managing user signups/accounts/permissions/etc.

Well, if you're using it like it's supposed to be used, all of it is accessible by a third party and its availability depends on them. It will all be potentially scrapped (meaning it will be). You are essentially outsourcing the hosting as well, with its pros and cons. I'm heavily biased against that, so it's not only a github thing but a "cloud computing culture" thing. I only use other people's computer when using my own is a real problem or it's just not feasible.

The other commenter nailed it down. But I want to add that removing dependance on US companies is not some kind of spiteful act. It's purely down to both privacy and reliability.

Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.

Open standards, private software is the way to go. It makes sense for any entity to control their own destiny.

As if EU doesn’t involve itself with software, policy and censorship which has its own inherent risks

The EUs interests focus heavy on regulation, standardisation and privacy. They avoid letting private companies dictate the terms.

Isn't perfect, but it's getting better and it's a work in progress.

Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.

Next year: LeGit !

"la forge" in french is feminine, it would need to be LaGitette

[dead]

I propose gitgud.eu

Foul tarnished, I have given thee courtesy enough.

The full phrase is older than Demon Souls.

Sounds legitimate

Fun fact: In french, Github, is pronounced « Guy Teube », where « Teube » is the backslang of « Bite », which can be literally translated by “Dick”.

So to give an example, is as if English speaking peoples would use a service named “Davedick”.

Or GitOobe.. although I like the idea of ÜberGit.eu

It's unfortunate that g.it isn't available.

I'm sure governments can ask the registrar to make it happen.

Exactly, we do have private forges we build and deploy from.

Surely everyone who uses GitHub has a local copy, that's pretty much how git works.

This is probably just the first big step (communications) in a series of big steps.

I remember seeing some projects by the French government on their self-hosted Gitlab. Maybe these are just public mirrors of their private repos?

React is also from US, no?

What problem is hypothetically encountered by a US-originated OSS frontend framework dependency?

Hidden code, and perhaps long term inability to come up with your own solutions.

Refreshing and impressive indeed. I wish other governments did this, esp those that are larger / have a reasonably large tech scene (e.g. Northern Europe, Nordic, AUS, Japan, Canada, Germany, India, etc).

It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.

I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.

Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.

> Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.

As a European, I agree. Zooming out a little, though, this whole decoupling process of entire economies (which has been well underway for a while) is going to increase the probability of armed conflict as the repercussions of military engagement will be lower.

Germany has https://www.opendesk.eu/de and https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund. both mentioned on HN

I had known about the OpenDesk, but the Sovereign Tech Fund is new to me. Glad to hear that it exists...

Does anyone know if the German govt has mandated the use of OPenDesk (and its like) across its internal use? I faintly recall there being a Linux distro (?) that was supported by German fed?

Have Germany supplanted office for these alternatives?

It’s super cool they exist, if they’re not used… I mean, it’s still super cool they exist?

I agree with this totally. But while they certainly talk the talk I’m not totally convinced that European governments will actually walk the walk and follow through on this.

To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks.

It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS to use it.

Why would a private company deciding to release a Linux version of their product signal a government's follow-through? As far as I can tell, there is no current connection between Solidworks and the French government.

Solidworks is produced by a company that is owned by the Dassault Group.

There is always a connection between the military industrial complex of a nation and the state.

If France feels that it is an existential threat they will not let the design and maintence of their weapons be dependent on an operating system produced by a company based out of a country that has threatened them.

I'm not saying that this will happen. I'm saying that should this happen you know France is serious about eliminating dependencies on unreliable and threatening countries.

EU have access to Windows source code. Presumably if the shit really hit the fan we'd have a European build without all the spy/crapware added? Not much of a consolation given we'd have to be on the brink of WW3 for it to happen...

I'm out of the loop, how does the EU have access to Windows source code?

I think even Russia had it at some point. Microsoft is ready to allow it, if it is needed to convince state structures using Windows.

Great remark, I will add that Solidworks is more intended for small CAD work, industrials usually use Catia for deeper CAD work, which is also owned by the Dassault Group. Both are developed for Windows.

500k and 3 really smart people can get solidworks running under wine in a few months. The barrier of entry seems pretty low.

> But while they certainly talk the talk I’m not totally convinced that European governments will actually walk the walk and follow through on this.

Yes, that is my own opinion too... that the EU states start with good intentions, but end up with bickering on all sides, with the end result of vastly neutering their own actions :-/

Would like to see how far this French initiative goes...

Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy.

Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.

Completely confused about which parts are sarcasm. Pretty sure the last sentence is and by this the rest must be as well. But oh boy in what kind of world do we live where you seriously can't tell easily anymore.

To be fair, Trump seems to be doing more for software freedom and against rent-seeking US monopolies than any previous president. Not saying he's doing it intentionally, but he is doing it. Heck, maybe he applies that policy domestically and US software companies flourish once again without the grip of big tech and unfair business practices that starve their competition. Right to repair, reverse-engineering and modding coming very soon...

First sentence is genuine and the last, with the Nobel prize, it's sarcasm, so you nailed it. But it confused a lot of Sheldons based on the number of downvotes I received.

I work on BlockNote (https://www.blocknotejs.org), the block-based editor that powers Docs (https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs).

1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project

Do they have an impact on the roadmap? Like special features for gov work or specific integration?

And I believe BlockNote uses tiptap/prosemirror, no? Do they also contribute to those “primitives”? That would be a very nice gift to the OSS community

They're pretty mindful of sponsoring things that also works for us. I.e.: we try to align both our roadmaps as good as possible.

We're discussing how to work best with downstream dependencies as well. So far they're actively sponsoring Yjs, but not prosemirror/tt.

fyi, here are some early thoughts by the PM of Docs on how to collaborate between public sector and OSS (companies): https://github.com/virgile-dev/playbook-work-with-oss-librar... (we surely don't check all the boxes yet, but it's good to have the discussion!). Feel free to jump in!

AFAIK - and what is mentioned at the bottom here[0] - La Suite is a joint effort by French and German (and others) governments.

I did try a local installation of Docs when i first saw the project a few months ago (i do not remember if it was posted here or on Reddit, though i think one of the developers posted in the comments wherever i saw it), it seems fine though it did feel a bit sparse for all the docker containers it expected from me to setup. I guess for an organization this might be ok, but it did feel a bit overengineered, especially since the actual functionality doesn't seem to be much (and the core editor isn't even written by them).

[0] https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

Here's what I gathered:

- TChap - Group chat (looks like Slack / Discord)

- Visio - Video meetings

- FranceTransfert - File Transfer

- Messagerie - Email client

- Fichiers - Cloud file storage

- Docs

- Grist - Spreadsheet

Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.

Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.

That website is specifically to explain it to French audiences.

German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home

I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

FWIW, NLNet is distributing EU funds, not Dutch funds.

That said, the Dutch government is collaborating with La Suite (fr) and OpenDesk (de): https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/

je maintiendrai!

"Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French"

Where I live names that aren't so obviously American have an advantage.

Is the German version of La Suite: OpenDesk? Because to me (Dutch) I like the OpenDesk name better.

> Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.

Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.

As a francophone, I can tell you that the vast majority doesn't.

Among software developers, the vast majority does.

definitely not at a native level...

Why are you nitpicking this? Are all French people incompetent laggards at speaking English? No, definitely not. There’s nothing about being French which makes you incapable of typing English text and maybe even *gasp* using a spell and grammar checker. The GitHub org shows seven people, is it so hard to believe they’re not absolute dolts at English? Why are you hell bent on insulting yourself?

https://github.com/orgs/suitenumerique/people

The Dutch are also working on this: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/

Which uses LaSuite.

The Dutch would probably use it no problem without even noticing it was French, same way they would if it were German, or English.

Looking through the resources you've linked is one of the most hopeful and awesome software experiences I have had in a while.

There's a chance to unlock tremendous value for society here.

Imagine if you could fix all the awful bugs making video conferencing software shitty for you! It's perhaps the most bug-plagued software out there in the world, with the highest number of complaints I have ever seen.

We've had a large detour away from open-source running the core of the internet, at least outside of web pages, but this sort of software feels like we're getting back to the 90's and earlier.

Vive la France!

Zoom isn't buggy I wouldn't say. It's really good.

That's been my personal experience, but colleagues on Linux are continually fighting it.

I gave up on the native Zoom client on Linux right away, it was completely broken. It worked well enough on a browser to get through the project though.

Same with Teams, the video calls work fine on a browser. You just can't use any background pictures or effects.

Teams in Firefox on Linux does work with backgrounds for me, and since a few months you can even upload custom backgrounds.

Actual calling works well enough, I would say it is more stable than the native Windows client ever was.

> You just can't use any background pictures or effects.

Thanksfully it is fairly easy to present a virtual webcam that is a composition of what your real physical webcam is showing and whatever background you want.

Can you give some pointers about this? I thought it's straight to kernel modules territory if I want a virtual webcam.

you can do it with ffmpeg but the most user friendly way is to use obs.

https://obsproject.com/kb/virtual-camera-guide

https://usercomp.com/news/1413136/ffmpeg-virtual-camera-guid...

I used that back in the days in 2019 / early 2020 when it was not yet possible to share your screen on msteams under wayland in chrome and firefox.

Thanks!

This one made me laugh , thanks ! I wish there was some kind of slashdot like ´funny’ tag

I mean if they're half as good as Handbrake and VLC I'm up for trying

Should’ve called it OuiChat

Is there not a FOSS solution like this already that they could just deploy?

I like how they go to digital sovereignty on office. And then immediately turn around an host on Github.

That is awesome

[dead]

0% chance of working out

> Used each month by more than 500 000 staff, in 15 ministries and many administrations.

Right. Just like edge is used on 100% of windows

Okay fine, I'll take the bait. How do you define "working out" to conclude that there's 0% chance of it?

You think government staff just use whatever software they want?

Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you.

France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)

>For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does

I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.

The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.

Even worse than most people realize: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/the-eu-can-be-shut-down-with-a-fe...

That includes:

Dependency on US-hosted digital services (emails, chat, calendars, ticket systems, online editors, file hosting, sync services, payment providers) — e.g., Gmail, Google Docs.

Dependency on third-party authentication providers — e.g., login via Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and iCloud on iPhones.

Dependency on US cloud infrastructure providers — e.g., companies relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Dependency through supply chain partners who rely on US tech — e.g., digitization partners using AWS/Azure impacting invoice processing.

Dependency on US-based business IT software and data services — e.g., banks using Microsoft LDAP, accountants using Dropbox, telecoms storing data in Oracle data lakes.

Dependency on US-controlled operating systems on user devices — e.g., Windows, macOS, iOS, Android.

Dependency on US-designed chips in most devices — e.g., Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple chip hardware.

France is the only country in Europe and likely the world that builds anything defense related in France. Pistols, machine guns, aircrafts, ships, helicopters, etc, it's all french.

The big stuff, sure, but the French state's small-arms capacity (while once impressive) has atrophied to the point of non-existence.

They rely on the Germans (and to a point, Czechs) to supply their military these days.

Are you saying only French companies build defense stuff in France or it's the only country in Europe that builds defense stuff in general?

Germany has quite a lot of defense companies that supply half the world I think.

They are saying that France is the only country that builds its own defence stuff only in country (unlike Germany that would buy American jets, for instance).

And it's true for most things that matter. The only exception I can think of is manufactured by cooperative companies that are part owned by France and have facilities in France but that specific thing might be made somewhere else (e.g. Airbus A400Ms for which the final assembly is in Seville, but Airbus is jointly owned by France, Germany, Spain), and small arms (HK, German made). Small arms don't really matter in the grand scheme of things due to the low barrier of entry both for acquiring off the shelf and setting up domestic manufacturing. Good luck doing that with fighter jets or cruise missiles.

airbus is owned by germany and france to each 10% and spain 4%. Things get interesting if you count all the owners from the states together they have ≈ 12%. But it is controlled by Germany france spain.

> This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything.

More to this point, the article points out that one of the drivers of all this is when Microsoft killed one of the emails an ICC prosecutor's email because the US administration sanctioned them:

> A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.

> The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.

Since WW2, German national pride is something that is not very well received, added to that the old east/west divide, and the generally strong identification with ones own state/region. It is a complex affair.

> The real troublemaker is ... Germany

Everyone is responding with rationale for this, but it's not actually true it's it? It feels like every week we see another German state moving away from Microsoft etc.

Some are, some arent.

The Bavarian state for example just signed a huge deal with MS.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cloud-Row-in-Bavaria-over-billi...

Sure but I still think it's unfair to characterise Germany as an outlier or a "trouble maker." Weren't they also the ones who took the privacy fight to Google with regards to things like Street View? That kind of behaviour is making trouble for US companies.

You're basically saying Western European countries' relationships with the US haven't changed much since the Cold War.

I wouldn't agree to that. However we are in the middle of a new cold war since orange guy the first and pretty much manifested it with orange guy the second.

France does everything right except produce much software. I'm sure it can copycat things pioneered by the US, and 20 years later, but that's not exactly difficult.

Sounds like a pretty good deal for France to fork US software from 20 years ago, because shit sure hasn't improved much since then.

It definitely has, but it's more that US hardware has advanced incredibly over that time period.

To me this is the point right? Everything that's spent enough time in the oven and has been commodified should be eventually launched as a public service. If we lived in a reasonable world this would be how things are done instead of installing permanent toll booths on everything and letting it get shittier and more expensive.

Doesn't really matter if copycat or not in this case. I'd argue it's even better to be a copycat in order to move faster.

why does it matter if it is difficult? You are right, these systems should be well understood by now. And public domain.

Obviously you've never seen French software, so why pretend like you have?

Counterpoints: Deezer, Doctolib, Back Market, Tidal, Adopte, Mistral, Dassault Systemes (the company behind the two main CAD softwares out there), Thales, Qonto, Kyutai, Mirakl, BeReal, Klaxoon, ABTasty, etc etc. We can do this all day.

Oh, and there are ton of official government open source projects.

And no, "but they're not as big as a FAAG" does not mean that the software isn't good or innovative.

Europe? Uh, I think you mean the whole world.

[flagged]

> The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government

Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.

> Where do you get your information from?

Comment right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877163

> even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.

One would hope, but evidently not!

I don't know if you're joking, but if not you need to start paying attention to what has been happening in US courts recently.

Mind bringing up any concrete examples?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

I think it’s more accurate to say that US corporations are subject to US law. Indeed there are no laws that say anything about corporations prioritizing the party in power, but they often do as matter course.

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.

Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

But all I found was:

https://github.com/btp/teams-cli

https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?

You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.

That's just a pure lesson in pain.

Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.

Sorry to hear. Pulling teeth with pliers on-premise has been out of support for a while. Please contact our sales team if you haven't tried our Pliers Copilot 365 For Teams and Dentists offering yet. It solves any problems you might currently experience.

Audibly laughed. Thank you for that.

Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)

I actually had a look. Now you can get messages and stuff from MS Graph. The situation is better than a few years ago when only very useless Teams APIs were available.

But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.

I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. The number of times I've heard the notification sound, gotten a toast while in the middle of something, and then been unable to find what the hell that notification was for, because some other device I'm logged in on has helpfully marked it read.

Then begins the hunt through chats, meeting chats, group chats, channel chats and the notification pane (which doesn't show every type of notification!?) to find what it was.

Absolutely maddening.

I'm in the same boat and I am this close to just torching the mainsail

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-te...

Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.

> get something even worse than Teams

I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...

I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.

I guess we could concoct something made out of PHP4/5 and jQuery and use Xampp stack, to get something worse. Or wait, I have it! We build it on top of MS Excel!

I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?!

Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.

What are the downsides of Discord?

The Zen of Teams is that Teams is so clunky it cannot be Slack.

Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette.

When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids.

When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate.

The software is baffling. But I like it that way.

For the most part I agree with you: there is less functionality and hence less to police. There are also fewer people in chats/channels, as for the most part they are private or undiscoverable.

There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.

You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off

I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.

This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)

That: and microsoft routes all calls through their servers.

Fine if you live near a datacenter.

In Sweden though, you go through France.

Not ideal.

How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.

One day they will discover threaded conversions.

And then we will get rid of them again, because some suits are telling us that we don't actually want them, that they are "complicated", we must trust them and that recursive data types are too hard to get right. Let's all write SMS again. Or better yet, send fax.

Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.

Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.

"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?

Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.

Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.

The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.

Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.

> and lag constantly on modern hardware

This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.

And if I watch a movie it will pop up after 5 minutes

Out of all the things you listed (and I'd have a couple more), copy-paste is really what drives me insane, because it's completely cursed!

Sometimes, text copied from teams includes `[Sender Name, 2026-01-03, 21:51]` as a prefix—other times not. Sometimes you paste formatted text and it ends up pasted as formatted but inconsistent HTML, including (of course) text color of all things, rendering it black even with the dark theme, and thus unreadable. Other times you copy code, and there's two blank lines between each line when you paste elsewhere. It makes you cry, really.

I have used at least Skype, Meet/Chat, Slack, Teams and Discord, plus some other niche apps I can’t remember. In Discord, I like the ability to share user screens concurrently and the way you can just jump on a channel and have an impromptu meeting without much ceremony. But I have seen only one case of Discord in a corporate environment. My use cases are simple, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat with mentions and code snippets, once in a while a survey to pick a place for lunch. I have been using Teams daily since last October. No issues. If it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already. People I work with value their time. Also last week I was in a 2K+ people presentation with Q&A. I haven’t experienced most of the issues you mentioned, and don’t have the use case for some, like search or mobile. I use my email as my source of truth for communications, if it’s not in my inbox it didn’t happen. We are very diligent in keeping meeting minutes and transcripts which are shared my email at the end of the each call.

Your claim that "if it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already" just... totally misunderstands how enterprise software decisions work, even in organisations where people value their time.

Switching costs are enormous. Your organisation has Teams integrated with your Office 365 licensing, which means you're already paying for it. Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for. Finance departments kill these proposals before they reach decision-makers, regardless of how much time is wasted on Teams' inefficiencies.

The IT burden to move is quickly substantial. Migrating chat history, file repositories, and integrations takes months. You need to retrain users, update documentation, reconfigure SSO, and migrate bots and webhooks. Most IT departments are already understaffed. Unless Teams is completely non-functional, that project never gets prioritised over security updates, infrastructure maintenance, or business-critical requests.

Organisations don't optimise for employee time the way you seem to think they do. The calculus isn't "is this tool good", it's "is this tool bad enough to justify the cost and disruption of replacing it". That threshold is extraordinarily high. People tolerate inefficient tools because the alternative is fighting procurement, convincing IT, and enduring months of migration pain. Lotus Notes persisted in enterprises for over a decade despite being universally despised because the switching cost was too high. SAP is notorious for terrible UX but remains entrenched because migration is a multi-year project costing millions.

Your workflow actually proves the point. You use email as your source of truth because Teams' search and organisation aren't reliable enough. You manually distribute meeting minutes and transcripts because you don't trust Teams as a system of record. You've built workarounds to compensate for the tool's deficiencies and normalised them as standard practice. That's not Teams working well, that's your organisation adapting to work around its limitations.

Let me address the specific issues you haven't encountered:

- Teams' resource usage is measurable and documented. PC World's 2023 benchmarks showed Teams using 1.4GB RAM at idle compared to 500MB for Slack and 350MB for Discord. ExtremeTech's testing found Teams taking 22 seconds to cold start versus 4 seconds for Slack on identical hardware. r/sysadmin consistently reports Teams causing performance problems on machines with 8GB of RAM, forcing hardware upgrades. Microsoft implicitly acknowledged this by completely rebuilding Teams in 2023, promising 2x faster performance and 50% less memory. The fact that they had to rewrite the entire application is an admission that the performance problems were architectural. (it didn't help though)

- Microsoft's own documentation acknowledges search limitations. The search index doesn't include all message content beyond a certain threshold. Results ranking is poor enough that Microsoft published a support article explaining how to use advanced search operators to find messages, which rather proves the basic search doesn't work. The r/MicrosoftTeams subreddit has over 3,000 posts about search not returning results that users know exist. IT administrators on Spiceworks report having to advise users to "use Ctrl+F in the browser if Teams search doesn't work", which is a workaround for a broken core feature.

- Files uploaded in chat messages don't appear in the Files tab automatically. They're stored in a hidden SharePoint folder that most users don't know how to access. Microsoft's official guidance for this is to manually move files to the Files tab or use SharePoint directly. Is that an edge case? Is it FUCK, it's documented in Microsoft's own support articles as expected behaviour. If your organisation hasn't hit this, it's because you're not using Files tabs or you've trained people to work around it.

- Microsoft's Tech Community forums have literally thousands of threads about notification badges showing unread messages that don't exist (5,000+ when I last checked), or notifications not appearing for actual messages. Microsoft's official response, posted repeatedly since 2020, is "we're aware of this issue and investigating". It's six years later now, it's still not fixed. The fact that you haven't noticed might mean your notification settings are configured differently, or you've unconsciously learned to ignore the notification count as unreliable.

- Going back to r/MicrosoftTeams: the community continually documents persistent issues with the mobile app... notifications not syncing with desktop read state, automatic logouts requiring re-authentication, messages appearing in different orders on mobile versus desktop, and the app draining battery faster than comparable applications. GitHub's issue tracker for Teams mobile shows hundreds of unresolved bugs (then again, I suppose what popular app doesn't). You mentioned you don't use mobile, which explains why you haven't experienced this.

- Regarding Chat versus channel architecture, Microsoft's own UX research lead, cited in a 2022 Verge interview, acknowledged that the distinction between chats and channels confuses users but can't be changed due to early architectural decisions. The duplicate groups issue I mentioned isn't a bug, it's a consequence of treating "Alice, Bob, Charlie" as a different entity from "Alice, Charlie, Bob". This is documented in Microsoft's developer documentation as intended behaviour. Your organisation either hasn't hit this scale yet or has developed unofficial naming conventions to work around it.

You've been using Teams for four months. These issues emerge over time, at scale, or in specific usage patterns. When you're managing multiple projects with overlapping team members across different time zones and need to reference decisions made months ago, the organisational problems compound. When you're working on older hardware or need reliable mobile access, the performance issues become blocking. When you need to find a specific technical discussion from six months ago buried in one of 40 channels, the search deficiencies become critical.

The question isn't whether Teams works for your specific, constrained use case after four months. The question is whether it's good software compared to alternatives, and whether the problems people report are valid. The evidence says yes, they are valid. The performance metrics are measurable. The bugs are documented in Microsoft's own forums. The UX problems are acknowledged by Microsoft's own researchers. The antitrust case is real.

Your experience is one data point. It's not invalid, but it's also not representative. Saying "I haven't personally experienced these problems in my limited usage" doesn't refute the documented experiences of millions of users, the measured performance benchmarks, or the systematic issues that Microsoft itself acknowledges. It just means you haven't hit them yet, or your use case is simple enough that they don't matter, or you've normalised workarounds as standard practice.

And, I haven't even started talking about what happens if you dare to work across multiple organisations.

Well said.

> Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for.

If only in this calculation they'd factor in how much time each employee wastes because of Teams glitches…

That's much harder to measure though, and to reduce to a dollar value. This is the cause of much of the dysfunction in the modern world.

Let's not forget how stupid the client on GNU/Linux was regarding audio devices. Every other app I had installed, that has anything to do with microphone (OBS, Audacity, Discord, Discord in Browser, Signal, ...) recognized my mic, which was connected via jack. Not MS Te-eams!!! Tada! Had to buy another headset with USB plug for Teams to get it.

I get the same issue on Mac, if it's any comfort. I had to close and reopen the app 7-8 times to have my microphone recognized, despite it worked reliably on every single tool I ever used, both on Linux and later on Mac. Teams couldn't do that either with the native client or with the web client.

> Typing has input delay.

Everything in Windows has input delay, ever since at Windows XP, it makes it infuriating to use.

Notifying you about messages you've already seen. You have to change chats and to back for it to dismiss it. Kills me.

Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.

It is slow.

The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...

Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).

It has a very large number of bugs.

My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this

Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.

It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.

The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.

I don't love it, but I don't have many of the problems other people seem to have. And I've used everything from IRC in the 80s to Slack more recently. The only thing I can think of is that I don't run it on Windows, but rather a fairly new MacBook Pro M4. Maybe in this case it actually runs better on Mac, which is kind of ironic.

It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.

And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.

Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr

Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?

Teams feels as though it were vibe-coded, but dates back well before there was such a thing. It works, basically, but isn't something I'd feel good about shipping myself.

Wrote up a few of my gripes on here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45933952

They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here.

The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.

Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.

Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.

A lot of companies already have Teams included in their existing licenses.

But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.

The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.

The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.

Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.

It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.

It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.

Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.

Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.

Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.

Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!

It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.

And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.

Oh, this is useful info... Another tool in the box of making other people realize how much it sucks.

I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.

I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me.

The new Outlook app is horrible though.

You kids have it easy.

Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.

I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.

By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.

Why would they do that? So annoying.

2 theories:

(1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever closing their gloriously developed MS Teams.

(2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!

Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.

> No more Teams? Sounds like a dream.

No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...

As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.

Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that.

Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.

It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies

It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.

As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.

> I don't need one app to do everything half-assed

That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."

Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.

Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.

It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.

Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.

If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.

It’s not why your big corp chooses teams and the msft suite. From a corp perspective they don’t care about your edge case. There’s only - is it good for 90% of my use cases across the enterprise? And - do I get a bundle discount? Last but not the least - do I need to expend developer resources on it vs anything else?

Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.

Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.

Our CEO Decided to use his own phone, use zoom instead of the corporate Teams, and uses ChatGPT where the rest of us are stuck with MS copilot test licenses. I guess its good to be at the top!

Reminds me when at my previous company, management got themselves top macbooks for filing excel sheets and replying to emails, while rank and file engineers got the budget Lenovos with 8GB RAM

Depends on company size and how much influence legal, security and asset protection have.

Usually at big corp I haven’t seen a ceo actually schedule their own calls or deal with day to day bullshit. They have a whole team of staff for that.

If you don’t want a half assed simulacra version, shouldn’t you prefer Teams open the native application?

Wdym?

  Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app…
  … I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well.

The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.

I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.

Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.

I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.

I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.

> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop

Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!

That kinda makes sense (and thank you!), but I think the comprehensive incompetence is thus:

1 - fails 2 - w/ no useful feedback to user; 3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either

Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.

For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software

Okay and what exactly does this integration bring?

- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;

- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;

- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.

Am I missing anything?

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

> Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office

A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.

It is 100% that bad.

Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs.

EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.

As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!

Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.

> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.

leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies

Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.

Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.

Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.

I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.

I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies

When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).

The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)

Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.

This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.

I have nothing to add other than that you put my argument perfectly, much better than I could. Policy and regulation are the failures.

agreed, but as long as Europe is divided, no politician will solve this.

That is the fundamental flaw of the EU model - a lack of leadership and authority at the top level.

They will have to change that. There were some small steps during Covid to create EU level funding mechanisms.

I'm not saying they have to grow a monstrous bureaucracy at the EU level - in fact they could probably do it less. But they definitely need more regulation to promote self-grown technology.

Eu Inc. will become a reality soon, so it isn't like the Commission is standing still: eu.inc/what-is-eu-inc

EU inc is worthless without alignment on a single capital market for fundraising and ultimately going public, sane/interoperable labor laws for hiring, and a single language market over the long term.

The last piece is extremely important. Being able to raise money and hire across the EU with no friction would be fantastic, but it means nothing if actually selling into different EU markets has massive language barriers (average people in many neighboring EU countries cannot communicate with each other beyond the level of a 4 year old). English fluency is massively overstated by people who only have visited European tourist capitals.

It's a crucial step on the way. Definitely nothing to scoff at.

Political tidal forces in Europe have, for quite some time, pointed more toward fragmentation than toward strengthening common structures. What makes this particularly ironic is that this impulse is often strongest among the same voices that most loudly lament Europe’s failure to build globally competitive industries—software foremost among them.

That tension has always struck me as deeply paradoxical. In the post-Brexit era, we have had a very visible case study in what happens when shared European frameworks are removed. The UK has spent years scrambling to recreate institutions, regulatory mechanisms, and coordination structures that had previously been provided at the EU level. One might expect that experience to have clarified the value of those structures. It largely hasn’t.

A significant part of the problem is deep lack of understanding. "EU bureaucracy" is a common target of criticism, yet it is remarkably rare for critics to have any concrete sense of what that bureaucracy actually does. The EU tends to appear in public discourse only when politicians argue, or when a regulation is framed as an intrusion on national sovereignty.

The everyday, unglamorous work of harmonization, reducing friction, enabling cross-border activity, and making markets function at scale—remains almost entirely invisible.

This creates a structural communication failure. The benefits of integration are mostly preventative and cumulative: things that don’t break, costs that don’t arise, barriers that quietly disappear. These effects are hard to convey through headlines or sound bites. Dry institutional reports are a poor match for a public sphere with limited patience for complexity. The result is a persistent undervaluation of the very mechanisms that make large, integrated markets possible.

Language barriers are often invoked in these discussions, and while they are real, their relevance is frequently overstated in this context. In white-collar professions, English proficiency is generally passable to good. This is especially true in software engineering, where English is effectively the working language of the field.

That said, proficiency is often domain-specific: people may read and write technical English fluently while still struggling with more active uses such as negotiation, persuasion, or conflict resolution.

In typical blue collar-type professions, by contrast, language barriers are substantial and unavoidable.

Where the problem becomes genuinely self-defeating is in the insistence that using English as a shared working language represents some form of cultural submission or imperialism. This view, rooted more in nationalist romanticism than in economic reality, adds pointless friction. It is beyond stupid to waste resources publishing official documents in 24 different languages. But eliminating this waste is a hard sell when you ask the muggles.

It brings us back to the central contradiction: the same people who regret Europe’s inability to produce globally dominant software companies often support attitudes and policies that fragment markets, raise transaction costs, and make such outcomes far less likely.

Europe cannot simultaneously expect to realize the benefits of scale and reject the mechanisms that make scale possible.

Trump and Putin are giving a golden opportunity to revive European integration. Alas, nationalistic populism with a badly hidden sympathy for the US (on the right) and Russia (on the left) seems to catch more votes these days.

Definitely agree, this is the classic left/right contradiction that has always existed.

In the past, center-left and center-right coalitions were able to find win-win compromises out of this contradiction. But now that everyone has moved outward on the political spectrum and gone populist on both sides, it's a stalemate.

The pro-central planning folks are now anti-business and anti-growth since private capital represents a threat to their utopian authoritarian dreams (this truth will be masked with religious appeals to the poor and the environment of course).

The pro-business, pro-growth folks are conversely anti-central planning, since government represents a threat to their utopian libertarian dreams (central planners might kill the unfair arbitrage opportunities they've found, and central planners tend to overspend and expect the private sector to pay for it).

While central planners are terrible capital allocators, strong central planning is the only way to create well functioning markets. For example, the US Federal government wields total control over US state governments in basically everything.

What Europe needs is a center coalition of pro-business and pro-government wonks (basically what the neocons were), but the phrase 'neocon' has become a bizarre internet meme for conspiracy theorists and there exists very little interest in moderate viewpoints these days.

I'm guessing we'll all be dead before any of these issues are solved in Europe (if ever), absent a full-scale Russian or Chinese invasion forcing the EU to integrate.

Yup. Culturally, the EU has favored more regulations over supporting more tech growth to an absurd degree.

Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.

But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.

If you prevent monopolies, and your neighbour doesn't, and your neighbour bullies you when you try to prevent their monopolies... it's not an easy situation.

That's really not the issue. EU tech companies aren't getting big enough to the point where "potentially a monopoly" is even a problem, other than maybe Spotify.

They are not, but EU tech companies have to compete against US monopolies. And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

This blog post starts off with a long-winded, meandering rant. Do you have something more succinct and less rant-y to back up your assertion of

> And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

?

This blog is written by Cory Doctorow. Whether you agree with it or not, I think it's worth going to the end :-).

It's a long transcript, I would recommend watching/listening to the video.

> And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

Better explained by Cory Doctorow, see link above.

I am French. When I look at the EU I see great potentials but the effect is a huge bureaucratic mess that is advantageous for everyone involved.

About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.

There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.

With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.

We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.

The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.

> (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds

"Eat" the funds? whaat? Is EU really viewed as some kind of charity to the ungrateful "easterners" in France? does surrendering their market and massively adapting and opening their economies to the dominant western EU economies completely goes unnoticed in this context? The provision of cheap educated workforce to the western companies also never happened?

BTW, Poland probably has the most pro-EU population with a full awareness that soon we will likely become a net payer. I am also starting to be convinced that this patronizing attitude from the "real" Europeans that is starting to drive EU skepticism in the eastern flank. peace.

> Is EU really viewed as some kind of charity to the ungrateful "easterners" in France?

Poland spending 9.1 B€, revenue 7.8 B€ → net beneficiary (1.3 B€)

France spending 16.4 B€, revenue 24.2 B€ → net contributor (7.8 B€)

> does surrendering their market and massively adapting and opening their economies to the dominant western EU economies completely goes unnoticed in this context?

What planes does LOT use? Boeing? What military aircraft? American. Who broke the contract on European helicopters to get American ones?

The US is not even in the top 5 investors in Poland, all are from the EU.

Who is going to go ahead for the nuclear umbrella? France, probably, not the US.

If Poland were suddenly not in the EU would that be a major issue for the EU or Poland?

Now, to be crystal clear: I love Poland. I travel there often, have very close friends and the country is magnificent. The education is top-notch, the culture as well. I am with all my heart with the progressive parties and not some bozos from PiS or the other party I forgot with the leader who looks like mentally ill (the one who was running with the fire extinguisher in the parliament or harassed a pro-abortion doctor).

But since we are talking money then let's not get emotional. And I am emotional when it comes to this particular country and of course mine - France.

I am all for Poland (and other countries) to be a true member of the EU, which brings some obligations as well. Including an adhesion of its population through the voting results. For this to talk to the general populations in the net contributor basket who will ultimately vote as well.

> The provision of cheap educated workforce to the western companies also never happened?

Yes it did. It is not "cheap" educated workforces because they are paid the same when in France (or other countries) and bring an extremely good education and cultural background. I know something about that.

It is a superbly educated workforce.

> BTW, Poland probably has the most pro-EU population with a full awareness that soon we will likely become a net payer

This is not reflected in the 2021-2017 EU budget but ok, maybe. Good luck with that (and I am saying this without any sarcasm, I really wish Poland to get as great as possible)

> I am also starting to be convinced that this patronizing attitude from the "real" Europeans that is starting to drive EU skepticism in the eastern flank. peace.

What our former president said (Chirac) about the "two speed Europe" is disgusting. There are no "real" Europeans. There are just political trends (fueled by votes) that adhere more or less to the EU as a whole and commit accordingly. Tusk was one of these people when he was in the EU Commission, but the wave seems to be diminishing.

> peace

Yes.

> Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.

Correction: They're paid by the EU taxpayers. And as politicians, there's a chance their vociferation of hate towards the EU is just parroting the opinion their voters have towards the EU, which means they're doing their job as politicians, whether you like their opinions or not.

>some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) [...] but hate it

Why is the EU treated like a sacred cow that people shouldn't be allowed to hate?

People's happiness with the EU is directly tied to their QoL and purchasing power and you don't need to be a scientist to see that the poorest people in the EU have been hit hardest by the energy price hikes caused by Germany's stupid anti-nuclear pro-Ruski gas decisions, the inflation caused by the ECB's excessive COVID money printing, the support of mass migration, and the EU's response to the war in Ukraine, leading to a massive decline in QoL and purchasing power, so of course they're not gonna be happy with the EU when their decisions negatively affected them.

The problem with the EU is that it pushes for blanket policies and solutions across the hugely diverse union, while different members get negatively impacted differently by each policy, some more some less, but the point is there cannot be a one size fits all solution that favors all EU members at the same time, leading to EU picking winners and losers with a widening inequality. So of course those drawing the short straw are gonna hate it.

Worth remembering that Hungary, Slovakia, et-al have loved the EU for many, many years after joining. It's not like they suddenly decided to hate the EU for absolutely no reason. So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.

> they're doing their job as politicians

Yes I completely agree with you. The EU is enabling spending its citizens' money to criticize itself. If this is not a sick situation, I do not know what this is.

To be clear, I am all for a union of European countries *that all participate in the effort. We need this to stand against the US or the BRICS block, without a union we are a set of insignificant countries that have fought for the last two millennia.

If a country wants to participate, it means it will pay for everyone (with a net zero for everyone) and buy EU products. Otherwise thsi is sabotage.

> Why is the EU treated like a sacred cow that people shouldn't be allowed to hate?

It is not a sacred cow, it is currently almost useless when it comes to hard decisions. So it should change. But if a country is in, it is in - and not pump in monety and complains about the organization.

We can have rich's problems when we are rich. In times of crisis we need to be a hard barrier. Which we are not.

> you don't need to be a scientist to see that the poorest people in the EU

You count Poland as a poor country? With its economic growth that will overtake UK?

> So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.

Who is "we"? If you are from the EU you can vote for your country to be represented by the correct people (who care about the region as a whole). Or vote for those who want to dramatically change it so that it fits to its role not only when everything is fine, but also in hard times.

>The EU is enabling spending its citizens' money to criticize itself. If this is not a sick situation, I do not know what this is.

It's called freedom of speech. Why is that sick?

EU is also spengin 600 billion/year on NGOs to do pro-EU political activism.

>You count Poland as a poor country? With its economic growth that will overtake UK?

Learn to read, I said "poorest people", not poor country, Poland and eastern europe have a lot more vulnerable people and less generous welfare state to cover you when you can't afford to live anymore. UK is a rich country that also has a lot of poor people, but a more generous welfare state.

>who care about the region as a whole

Nobody cares about the whole region. People living and paying taxes in Spain care about what's happening in Spain, not all the way in Romania or Bulgaria. So Spaniard elect politicians that will do what's best for Spain not what's best for other EU countries. Same for every other EU member. Politicians get elected on how they can improve the lives of the people in that specific country.

> Nobody cares about the whole region. People living and paying taxes in Spain care about what's happening in Spain, not all the way in Romania or Bulgaria. So Spaniard elect politicians that will do what's best for Spain not what's best for other EU countries. Same for every other EU member. Politicians get elected on how they can improve the lives of the people in that specific country.

This is an extremely nearsighted view of the bloc.

Things that benefit the EU will benefit my country too. Things that make Romania or Bulgaria worse will also impact the other countries in the bloc. I thought we learned this lesson when countries like Greece had fiscal issues back in the day.

Politicians at the EU level should be concerned by their country, but also should be concerned about the bloc as a whole.

And this is true to national politics too. A member of a national parliament typically is concerned with the province/county/constituency he represents, but also with national issues as a whole.

>This is an extremely nearsighted view of the bloc.

It's not. It's the most realistic and true to life there is.

>Things that benefit the EU will benefit my country too.

Forget about you. Most voters don't care about the rest of the EU, they care about their own country first.

>Things that make Romania or Bulgaria worse will also impact the other countries in the bloc.

Yeah but most people in rich EU countries won't give a fuck about that.

> Worth remembering that Hungary, Slovakia, et-al have loved the EU for many, many years after joining. It's not like they suddenly decided to hate the EU for absolutely no reason. So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.

Please do so.

All 3 countries benefit massively from being in the EU, particularly Poland, who is on track to become one of the largest EU economies.

In fact, every country in the bloc benefits immensely from being in the bloc. The UK is a good reminder that leaving only brings stagnation.

European countries are relatively small in the world stage. Think that Germany has the popularity of Chinese provinces. In trade negotiations the EU gets to play much tougher than any individual country would ever dream of, and free access to the whole bloc is a massive benefit.

Is it perfect? Obviously not. But more often than not, the downsides and inefficiencies come from the fact that individual countries still hold too much power, and have too many redundant bureaucracies with the bloc itself.

>All 3 countries benefit massively from being in the EU, particularly Poland, who is on track to become one of the largest EU economies.

So what? That doesn't change the fact that living costs far outpaced gains for a lot of people. They still deserve to be angry and ask for how are you gonna fix their problem.

If they think the fix is leaving the EU... Well, good luck. What else can I say?

Cost of living being expensive is due to national government inability to handle housing, infrastructure, etc and so forth. The EU does not dictate housing policy in member states, for example.

If the population is stupid enough to misunderstand the role of the EU and the role of their own national government, and prefers to listen to retarded propaganda that blames the EU for all their woes, then they deserve the hardship that will follow as much as they deserve being angry.

ehm,

Poland has a steady grow and might leap the UK in the nearby future. UK does not have grow per Capita since Brexit. Hungary is poor because Orban is corrupt and corruption is bad for economy.

>Poland has a steady grow

Can nobody read anymore? I said "poorest people". You can easily have a growing GDP like Poland while more and more people can't afford to pay bills anymore. The GDP going up graph is meaningless for that.

Usually growing means a better living standard the general population and I think this easily applies for Poland.

Could you provide a source for " You can easily have a growing GDP like Poland while more and more people can't afford to pay bills anymore. ", Mister "Nobody can read anymore"

> EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies.

It's not like there are people out there on the campaign trail every election saying "if I'm elected, I'll ensure we build homegrown cloud alternatives". Nobody campaigns on issues like that. The reality is you have to choose between people who want to kick the immigrants out and people who don't, people who want to enact green policies and people who don't. People who want a European army and people who don't. These big issues are what people vote on, even if we care that there should be a homegrown cloud industry. I really do care, but it's not something I can do anything about at the ballot box

Europe's main strategy these days seems to be blaming others instead of looking at themselves.

For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.

They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.

They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.

At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.

You are framing this as moral blame. It isn't about that. It is about strategic risk.

Why would we blame the US for our own inability to build a viable software industry? Europe has been painfully aware for years that this is self-inflicted.

The reason there is now serious talk about reducing dependence on the US is not resentment, it is risk. Dependence used to be a convenience. It is increasingly a liability. Trust in long-term stability, rule continuity, and alignment of interests is no longer something we can assume. That changes the calculus, regardless of who is "at fault".

From the perspective of someone who works in software, I’m glad this conversation is finally happening. It’s not about assigning blame. It is about taking responsibility for capabilities we should never have outsourced so completely in the first place.

If this looks like blame from the outside, that’s a misunderstanding of what self-correction looks like.

Nothing about moral blame. Just what I read about online as reasons various things are happening. European leaders told India that it was the main reason for the Russian war. I'm sorry thats ridiculous. Europe is ridiculous frankly

I don’t think you must be following European politics very closely and you are getting worked up about things that are not real.

No heads of state or government in Europe believes, or claims, that India is to blame for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

They blame Russia for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

I can’t know where you get your “news” from, but perhaps you should consider trying to follow more serious news organizations. AP, Reuters and BBC are highly factual with little or no political spin. For more analytical content you may consider The Economist, but be aware that they do publish opinion as well.

You seem to need a news diet that is higher on factuality and lower on spin.

> They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil

India and the EU have managed to work as adults and find a way to sign an FTA [0] and Defense Pact [1] last week. The adults in the room found a way to compromise and turn a zero sum game into a stag hunt and anyone repeating tired tropes like above is either extremely uninformed or a bot.

[0] - https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...

[1] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-...

> The adults in the room found a way to compromise and turn a zero sum game into a stag hunt and anyone repeating tired tropes like above is either extremely uninformed or a bot.

If there were adults in the room in 2023, trump doesn’t get elected.

The adults in the room bypassed a democratic primary. The adults in the room proffered up a candidate whose vote platform was solely based on “I’m not him!”

Adults cut from the same cloth made the same emotional decisions with this trade agreement: “we aren’t trading with trump!” Fuck yeah, now what?

The adults in the room lost the plot decades ago.

Read my comment, and dig into the context. Also, who said the current situation is not something some of us so called adults are opposed to [0][1]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43574128

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989996

I mean… respond to my comment and I’ll click those links and do the homework to give a thoughtful response to yours…?

I responded to your comment. If you cannot read between the lines that's on you.

> I responded to your comment. If you cannot read between the lines that's on you.

It isn't on me to infer your thought processes. How strange.

There's plenty of chatter these days that Europe needs to be more independent from other powers, needs to be more competitive and so on.

What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.

* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.

[dead]

> I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!

Only to do business with US companies, or have a USD account with some payment providers such as Wise I think, not for anything else.

>EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies.

France has been doing this since De Gaulle. That's why they're able to do this now, as well as produce almost everything they use that is defense-related.

> I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!

Could you name which European nation this was?

I would genuinely be interested in knowing.

>>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.

People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.

> Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:

https://youtu.be/ToJxd3HBviE

Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.

Talk to actual Trump voters and you'll see they support his tariffs and immigration crackdowns because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community. They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them. Even though that's totally backwards, and Trump is just making everything worse, that's what they believe.

Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.

> because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community.

Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.

70 million Americans voted for him. His biggest demographic win compared to the last election was non-white men.

Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.

To the contrary! They were tricked to believe that they were part of society. They aren't. By voting for Trump they reassured themselves that it won't happen to them. Often times racism against the newest group of immigrants coming from the group of immigrants before them is seen by the latter as a rite of passage to be accepted into US society.

The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today. Now they are seen as white but before WWI they weren't seen as white by the WASPs. And it's totally normal for some of the second or third generation immigrants to become racist against new immigrants. Rite of passage.

It's zero-sum thinking, "the pie isn't big enough and can't get bigger and I'm afraid, so I'm going to hurt other people so that I don't get hurt".

Yes. And they still remember where they are coming from and they fear that they might again lose their piece of the pie to the groups that are considered more "American", so they feel the need to prove their place in society by cheering the leader who is preaching that the pie is getting smaller and that someone has to leave the table. This fear is handed down over generations and for some families or communities it transforms into hatred. This mechanism is very often played by amoral populists because it works so well.

Many of the most disgusting and radical Democracy hating people in Trumps inner circle are Catholics by the way. Go figure.

> The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today

To your earlier point: Boston racism is now legendary (see Celtics fans)

Notable and recent: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clym85ev64lo

> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy.

> "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong country again."

...

> One poll, from Pew, suggested that 93% of Latinos who cast their votes for Trump rated the economy as their primary issue, with violent crime and immigration trailing far behind.

> Data from the new CBS poll shows that a significant majority of Latinos - 61% - disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, while 69% disapprove of his handling of inflation. The vast majority said they judge the performance of the US economy through prices.

> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024

Did he just wake up from a coma?

The dems are just as corrupt, just wiith a nicer smile. Eu citizen, here - all politicians are bent. Anecdata: Anyone who votes for a politician should stfu, stop complaining and live with it. Why should i suffer alone? Disenfranchised? Not me - idgaf. I just hope the eu gets its act together and actually does something, but it will be difficult; language alone, being one of them, and "my pie", another.

> The dems are just as corrupt

that's just simply not true and arguing like this publicily increases acceptance of corruption.

>"They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them"

Well it fucking is. But thinking that current king can fix it is a lunacy

What was the alternative? More of the previous administration?

Yes, and I would have been perfectly happy with that. The status quo was very much preferred to the chaos we are now experiencing. Just because I wanted different changes does not mean voting to burn it all down is the best alternative to no changes.

People should have spoken up in town hall meetings and protest on the streets years ago. Now it's a bit too late, but better late than never. Americans rather sit on the couch, watch TV or be absorbed by their smartphone than to go out to their representatives and demand accountability. Instead they "shit" on every institution and person who seems to fight for justice and liberty. You get what you deserve guys. You can't vote with your wallet. You have to try to get to those people in power IN PERSON and pressure them. That's the only thing they understand.

You know what the most effective instrument of power is? Distance. The rich and powerful distance themselves physically from the people, so the demands, worries, accusations, questions etc can't reach them.

Well the one now is definitely worse. Not that I like the one before. Something better is needed

The reality in 2024 was that yes, the alternative was more of the previous administration.

Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.

The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.

What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.

I prefer to live by the adage of actions speak louder than words. I’m capable of lying to present a facade, and I have to assume others are too.

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Voting for a traitorous convicted felon is why I can't stand federal level Republican voters.

What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?

For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).

> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?

If your position is that racism and sexism are the root of the problem — which I am not contesting — how wise do you think it was for the Democrats to try running with a black woman?

Obviously, it was not wise. Hope they don't make the same mistake again.

> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?

Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.

If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.

> Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism

Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.

> It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms

He got less than 50% of the vote, if the Dems are pushing so many people to Trump they are doing a crappy job of it.

Though I do agree that the Dems suck on messaging, it is not because they villainize Republican voters. It's because they don't focus their efforts on bread-and-button progressive priorities like labor and healthcare. They blew their wad on trans rights, which just isn't a great strategy to move a lot of voters to the polls.

> Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.

I don't think anyone ever embraces being called deplorable, that seems like a strange take. If anything, being called deplorable would just make someone dislike the name-caller. Don't take my word for it, this is behavior exhibited by children and adults every day.

Or are you twisting up a reference where HRC called the right "a basket of deplorables" ?

I've got a number of right wing acquaintances, they 100% call themselves deplorable. And yes, in response to Hillary's use of the term. Even though she didn't call everyone on the right a deplorable, this did not stop them from running with it.

And they do embrace it. To the point where they say 'dirka dirka' when the topic of our Indian managers comes up (never mind that the original movie reference was about Arabs, but whatever), and making comments about women in positions of authority at the company. That's in addition to the comments about trans people.

Hard to say whether that attitude came first or second. And while I can definitely appreciate that nobody wants to be looked down on, there is no requirement that you respond to that by doing that which you are accused of.

If the messaging doesn't change there is a ~50% chance JDV wins next, and the joke will be on the whole world. It is absolutely in the best interest of the entire _world_ for the left to figure out the messaging.

There was a time right after the election [0] where messaging was being talked about, and it seems that effort tailed off as people got more emotional and angry, which I suppose isn't surprising.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/22/democrats-woke-lang...

> Voting for a traitorous convicted felon

The Epstein revelations show that pretty much everyone that could make it to the ballot list has skeletons in their closet. The only difference is that some of them manage to hide it better than others.

I doubt that, but in reality, Harris was on the ballot, and was squeaky clean relative to her opposition.

And there's levels of skeletons, but calling up a governor and asking them to find votes and baselessly casting doubts on elections and endorsing and freeing people who attacked the US government is not on the same level of everyone else's skeletons.

The Republican party is openly racist. More than it has ever been in the last 40 years! And you are claiming otherwise. You are actively looking the other way if you dismiss this. It's not normal and why should the Democrats copy the Republicans? So they lose the liberal voters who aren't okay with bigotry and revenge politics? Because no matter what the Democrats say, the MAGA Republicans will always beat them at that, and people will still vote for the OG racists anyway.

Your argument is coming up everytime when right-wing populists gain votes, and it's always a fatal trap. Merz in Germany claimed to beat the AfD (who is loved by Bannon and Musk and was loved by Epstein btw, all "wonderful" people), and it failed he barely made it to become chancellor. It also failed in the 90s during the first wave of racism in Germany after re-unification.

This is why I personally believe that the "anyone is allowed to vote for anyone" style of democracy is really dumb, and Chinese "democracy" (whatever that is), is superior for governance.

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Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings. Prices levels do not come down without a depression, even if inflation slows. Their only solution is wages going up. Do they have a mechanism to push wages up? Taxes must go up, they have been too low for too long and the debt has accumulated (~$38T in US treasuries alone) and will need to be paid back or defaulted on. Insurance costs continue to rise due to rapidly increasing costs of materials and labor, as well as climate change (the US is currently spending ~$1B/year on climate driven events). Growth is over because the US population is not growing (tangentially, total fertility rate is below replacement rate in more than half of countries in the world, and this trend will continue). 401ks predicated on the S&P500 are held up by AI investment (which is outpacing consumer spending, the primary driver of the US economy, over the last year to the tune of ~$400B) and the Mag 7. When this stalls, everyone is going to be sad and not feel as wealthy as they did previously (“wealth effect”).

Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.

Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026

(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)

> Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings.

This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.

Politics is completely driven by uncritical "just so" narratives. The people pushing the discourse never check or justify their assumptions with actual data. This is the real issue.

> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.

~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...

Ok, but how about learn why that is instead of just insulting half the population. In politics, it is best to be liked and quoting such things doesn't help.

Now, why is literacy so low? Because we stopped teaching phonics in schools. When we switch back (in tests/experiments) phonics wins hands down. When we did teach phonics, we had the highest test scores in the world (now we are 17th or so). Who opposes switching back to phonics? Oddly the teacher's unions. Guess who is the biggest contributor to the Dems? Weirdly it makes sense when you frame it this way. Now, ask yourself why you didn't know this?

> Who opposes switching back to phonics? Oddly the teacher's unions. Guess who is the biggest contributor to the Dems? Weirdly it makes sense when you frame it this way.

I think you phrased that incorrectly, hopefully not intentionally in bad faith. What you mean is that something like 94% of teacher's unions political contributions go to democratic politicians. It is certainly untrue that the biggest contributions to democrats come from teachers, and it is trivial to find that out.

I am also skeptical that phonics is why teachers prefer democrats. It probably has a much stronger association with how villainized educators are by republicans.

Low literacy is driven by systemic poverty and, more recently, social media consumption.

Insulting facts are still facts, regardless of feelings about the facts. I am not in politics, being liked is irrelevant to me.

https://youtu.be/ZvCT31BOLDM

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...

> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.

Which begs the question: does democracy still work when voters are so easily misled? I don’t believe that the current generation is fundamentally more or less intelligent than the previous ones. Is technology to blame for disseminating misinformation too rapidly for us to cope?

The early American system was never designed to function as a pure democracy. The founders were openly skeptical of direct rule by popular will, fearing volatility, mob psychology, and the tendency for short-term emotional reactions to override long-term stability. Instead, they constructed a layered federal republic intended to filter public opinion through successive levels of deliberation.

In the original structure, the public directly elected members of the House of Representatives. This chamber was meant to serve as the immediate voice of the population — responsive, numerous, and frequently subject to elections. It represented popular sentiment but was intentionally balanced by slower, more insulated institutions.

The Senate originally functioned as that stabilizing counterweight. Senators were selected by state legislatures rather than direct vote. This meant they were accountable primarily to the governments of sovereign states rather than transient public passions. The Senate therefore protected state interests, ensured continuity of policy, and acted as a brake on sudden shifts in national mood. The 17th Amendment, which later established direct election of senators, fundamentally altered this federal balance by shifting the Senate toward popular representation rather than state representation.

The presidency was also designed to be buffered from direct democratic selection. The Electoral College was not merely a ceremonial intermediary. Electors were expected to exercise independent judgment and represent state-level deliberation. The system assumed electors would be politically informed individuals capable of evaluating candidates beyond campaign popularity or mass persuasion. In theory, this created a safeguard against demagogues or candidates elevated purely through public excitement.

The vice presidency was structured differently from modern expectations. Originally, the candidate receiving the second highest number of electoral votes became vice president. This design forced cooperation between rival factions and ensured that dissenting political voices remained inside executive governance rather than entirely excluded from power. Although this sometimes created tension, it reflected a belief that competing perspectives strengthened stability.

Underlying these mechanisms was a broader philosophy: governance should incorporate public input while filtering it through layers of institutional judgment. The founders feared what they called “tyranny of the majority,” where temporary popular consensus could override minority rights, long-term national interests, or constitutional boundaries.

Advocates of restoring earlier structural features often argue that modern reforms unintentionally removed stabilizing mechanisms. They contend that direct election of senators nationalized political incentives, encouraging senators to prioritize national party platforms over state-specific interests. Similarly, modern expectations that presidential electors must follow popular vote outcomes arguably transformed the Electoral College from a deliberative body into a procedural formality.

From this viewpoint, reintroducing intermediary decision makers could theoretically slow political volatility, encourage more qualified candidate evaluation, and strengthen federalism by returning power to state governments. However, proponents of such reforms often acknowledge that intermediary systems would require strong transparency, accountability standards, and anti-corruption safeguards. Without those protections, layered elector systems could risk elite capture or reduced public legitimacy.

Critics of restoring these structures typically argue that expanded direct voting increased democratic legitimacy, voter participation, and political equality. They often contend that intermediary systems historically enabled exclusion and reduced accountability to the general population.

The debate therefore centers on a classic governance tradeoff: stability and deliberation versus direct popular sovereignty. The original American constitutional framework leaned toward stability through representation filters, while modern reforms have leaned toward expanding direct electoral influence.

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Strawman

Failing to make xenophobic choices when it comes to...enterprise software, is the issue?

The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).

Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.

Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).

I think you are failing to realize the billions the US has made from "defending" europe. Regardless, once the US is no longer colonizing the entire planet and the dollar isn't the only currency anyone cares about your opinion will change realllll quick. You'll have forgotten this wall of nonsense you wrote though by then I'm sure.

Stop with this nonsense. You know it is false.

USA is not defending Europe from anyone.

It's crazy that this nonsense is still promoted - both by Republicans and Democrats, and leaders in Europe. WTF is wrong with people. If Americans are stupid enough to buy into the military-industrial conspiracy that we have to spend 10% of our GDP on defense, then they get what they deserve. The EU is right to call BS on that whole paradigm.

The US hasn't spent 10% of our GDP on defense since the cold war. We begged you (both parties) to at least keep at least token military and you couldn't even do that. And on the other side of your continent you have a real risk playing out right now that you can't defend yourself from. The EU is currently having plenty of negative consequences from absurd takes like yours. And even with all that, you write that dribble.

How someone voted has almost no bearing on the dangers of tech. The dangers were there before the last election and none of the candidates had strong positions regarding tech privacy. Microsoft would still be doing what it has been doing regardless of the election outcome. I wouldnt hold my breath that a European Teams/Zoom replacement will have robust encryption and privacy protection based on all the backdoor stuff I've heard being pushed in some European countries.

Many of us see them and are fighting the fight if our lives against it

The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.

1) Most US citizens don't care for what's happening right now. That's why there's people protesting while armed in major cities.

2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.

People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.

note: the europeans didnt particularly mind maduro's kidnapping, and crimea isnt a part of the EU nor NATO.

putin still has not gone to war, nor threatened to invade the EU yet to the point of international incident. the US has both sent politicians and other operators to try and fail at formenting rebellion in greenland against denmark, and has readied troops to invade

> putin still has not gone to war, nor threatened to invade the EU yet to the point of international incident.

Russian agents are thought to have committed numerous acts, almost all of which could be considered acts of war, on EU/UK soil, or against EU/UK nationals

* Poisoning of the Skripals with a chemical warfare agent, one dead, 2018, Salisbury, England, UK [0]

* Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with a radioisotope, one dead, 2006, London, England, UK [1]

* Vrbětice ammunition warehouse explosions, one dead, 2014, Zlín Region, Czechia [2]

* Jamming of GPS signals used by EU President Ursula von der Leyen's jet, 2025, Bulgaria [3]

* Arson of the Marywilska 44 shopping center, 2024, Warsaw, Poland [4]

* Shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over the Donbas, 2014, 283 dead, most of them Netherlands citizens [5]

* Sabotage of underwater telecommunications cables, railway lines, cyberattacks, probing airspace with armed aircraft, and on and on - just Google it, I don't have enough time to mention all of these.

... you were saying?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrbětice_ammunition_wareh...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/russia-europe-jamming-spoofing-gp...

[4] https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/05/12/poland-confirms-russi...

[5] https://www.britannica.com/event/Malaysia-Airlines-flight-17

I remember a conversation I had with my uncle before the 2024 election during which I told him Donald Trump's leadership would result in a no-less-disastrous American version of Brexit, if he were somehow elected a second time. My uncle's an avid Fox News/Newsmax watcher, and had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

A reminder that in the last presidential election, the winner was decided by one of the smallest margins ever, and the winner only won a plurality, not a majority.

Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).

Almost as many, but not more than :)

Fewer than 50% voted for it, which means more than that voted against it.

Negative. I encourage you to go look at the election results.

  Kamala Harris/Tim Walz      75,019,230  48.34%
  Donald J. Trump/J.D. Vance   77,303,568 49.81%
  Various Others               2,878,359  1.85%

Voting for a 3rd candidate isn't a vote against one of the other two, or does your logic work both ways? so 51.66% of people voted against Harris?

You know what, I don't even care if you respond. The election is over, and we can twist these numbers until the next election.

The logical leaps taken about voting for/against someone are troubling. The tropes around this are disturbing. The emotional vitriol around all of those are even worse.

The dude is the sitting POTUS. He stinks. Bitching about meaningless percentages isn't productive... at all.

There is no question that he won the presidential election in 2024.

However, when people say things like "this is what Americans voted for" ... there's a bit more nuance required. His election win is what our electoral process produced. But to conclude from that that an actual majority of Americans preferred his policies to anyone else's ... that's a mistake.

And yes, 51.66% of people voted against Harris - they could have voted for her, but chose to vote for someone else.

> The logical leaps taken about voting for/against someone are troubling. The tropes around this are disturbing. The emotional vitriol around all of those are even worse.

Alright, the next step is to accuse everyone who might try to ground the discussion in truth that they must have TDS. I am not a huge fan of accusing one's opponents of projection, but man, sometimes it really does seem to be the most plausible answer.

> Alright, the next step is to accuse everyone who might try to ground the discussion in truth that they must have TDS. I am not a huge fan of accusing one's opponents of projection, but man, sometimes it really does seem to be the most plausible answer.

Ground the discussion in which truth?

I mean this is essentially the same situation anyone is in when they have vendor lock in, they know it's a problem, but it is always just not worth it to get out, only this vendor lock in is all vendors from a country lock in and now it is not just worth it but imperative, absolutely necessary.

And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.

The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that people don't necessarily vote for the "best" candidate. Instead, they vote for the candidate who is "least bad" and do the minimum amount of damage to their interests. It is always a matter of compromise.

As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.

>As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.

I can't think of a candidate that fits this description.

Yeah, isn’t the point of extreme right to make the wrong calls for the majority of the population?

Historically, the right side was pro-monarchy. Then, you go extreme.

Terms like left and right only have meaning in one place at one time. So just because European conservatives 100 years ago believed something doesn't mean American conservatives today believe in that thing. That's why political scientists have terms like socialist, fascists, libertarian, etc. That's how US right (libertarian) is basically nothing like the right in Europe (conservative). That's because the basic axis of differences in the US is larger vs smaller government and in Europe it is completely different as both sides like larger government. I have tried to explain this to many Europeans over the years; somehow you are all allergic to understanding it. Its probably the only thing you all have in common.

The French Revolution, when left and right started, was 237 years ago by the way.

I agree about the scale being different across countries. The american politics would be only right on a common European left/right scale.

If everyone doesn’t understand, have you considered that another thing in common is what you try to explain?

> That's how US right (libertarian)

Except that the US right is not libertarian. If you ask them to describe themselves they often give that impression, but if you look at how they actually govern, libertarian is definitely not it.

I do not think many U.S. citizens were consulted on the decision to blow up Nordstream.

The French have created Mintel. May the world tremble.

It's a shame the Americans don't see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Minitel, when it was created, was great technology. Sounds like you are proudly uninformed.

Why did the French never follow up and improve Minitel?

It's fun to think about what Minitel might have become if it had been born when today's Leopards Eating People's Faces Party had been in power, rather than the early 80's when Silicon Valley was dunking on everybody. It was way ahead of its time.

Being Great doesnt comes with Best to Live with, Best to Work with, Best to make Business with etc...

US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)

As an American, this is awesome to see.

We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.

We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.

It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.

From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.

We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.

It’s in the US’s best interests to be a rule follower. It maintains our status as a global reserve currency. It gives our passports access to almost every country without visas. It attracts foreign investment.

As a US citizen, it is incredibly in my selfish interest for the US to not be a shitty friend. Just as it is in our selfish interest to promote democracy, less corruption, and free markets.

While I agree with those things, morally, they are also in the pure self-interest of the United States.

They are the ones that get to face almost all of the consequences from their government. And they know that if the people that voted on their current government don't get severally punished, things will only escalate.

The only people who hate Americans as much as (or more than) Europeans are Americans.

...

Nice troll.

I think the general vibe is more of a "let's learn a small lesson now than a severe one long term".

I'm an eu freelancer, most of my clients are quitting US SaaS and cloud offerings, albeit slowly.

So story time. About 8 years ago, most of corporate America tried to do this. It was called the ad-pocalypse. They came crawling back to SV in less than 2 months. Turns out, the correct response to an organized (politically based) pressure campaign is to tell them to pound sand.

When your customers see the dev bill (what it costs to make software that actually works and doesn't get its secrets stolen), they will do the same. But not after some LLM based disasters cause some chaos. Should make your life more interesting, no?

That time is over tho. Hosting, Protection and co is often cheaper, more reliable and less influenced by random orange decisions for a while now. Not to mention actually existing privacy and customer protection laws.

When orange man started to make up tarifs I figured it's easier to just quit any dependency I had to the US than to keep with with that bullshit. Took half a day and my infrastructure is more stable than it ever was.

I would say with basically 100% certainty who they voted for, for president.

Cognitive bias is brutal. They have no idea what they are doing to their own self interests.

Yet they all are just whiny when they voted for this, and would likely do it again and have no hesitation to do anything against it.

It's not that unsettling nor is it masochism.

It's called responsibility.

Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin

The selection of Americans commenting generally aren't suffering, and won't be suffering under any circumstances. They're upset that the institutions that they worship and rely on for their own professional legitimacy are now all under a buffoon, game show host, and professional wrestling valet. It calls into question the "meritocracy" that they believe rewards them for all their hard work.

They blame this on the people who lack merit, and didn't study hard enough to get their share of the highest profit margins in history. They want them to be punished. The people who actually do and make things, rather than shuffling things around, marketing things and sending emails.

It's no wonder that they hope for some sort of punishment to force people to flock to them. US Liberals offer working people absolutely nothing but mockery. The only reason they have a chance at getting back into government is because Trump's corruption will keep the people who voted for him from voting at all. MAGA (with fellow-travelers who voted for him while holding their noses, repulsed by the alternative) is falling apart over foreign wars, Epstein, and H1Bs, not any of the middle class lib objections. Democrats also will give you war, Epstein and H1B.

The midterms, and the next election, will be won by the side that has managed to disillusion slightly fewer voters to the entire democratic process. I'm sorry, but that still bodes well for the loudmouth strongman.

Yep, and watching many of my peers in tech get red pilled and vote for this administration, or even be active participants in it, has been very hard to stomach. Financial penalties might be the only thing that gets them to realize the error of their ways

We all know that the next guy is likely going to be much worse, and if it's not the next guy it will be the one afterwards. This shithole of country has a brutally bad track record of dealing with their own problems in a reasonable fashion

Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.

I think it’s also healthy overall for there to be multiple competitors in the market versus the tech monopolies we have now that have started abusing their customers.

>We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement.

How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.

America is "Three Corporations in A Trench Coat"?

Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.

But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.

> While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.

Has there been a non-Trump lunatic president? Or one that turned the government sharply left? I hear this kind of claim pretty often and I have trouble squaring it with reality.

Right, it’s pretty silly. None of the past three Democrats have been particularly to the left.

Even a true centrist would have built a public option along with the Affordable Care Act. Obama didn’t even support gay marriage when running in 2008! Clinton’s NAFTA accelerated American manufacturing shifting outside of the country. The craziest thing Gore would have done is combat global warming.

America is at best center-right. Our last leftist president was LBJ.

> anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America

They are more to the left of the population, yes. But nothing about them or the current left in the US is liberal in any real way anymore. The Dems are nothing like they were before about 2008 and the policies they push are very very different from the ones passed in that era.

PS Liberal means French enlightenment ideals which (for example) includes meritocracy as a core tenant.

Trump doesn’t have nearly the money he needs to win without dark money from corporations and oligarchs. Populism alone won’t win the presidency given the margins he’s had. The math doesn’t work.

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You can see my other comment in the thread calling out the US support of various genocides, including Palestine specifically. So, no, I’m not writing a pro-Apartheid apology.

There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?

Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud

If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.

Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".

We use it at work and everybody I asked loves it. I also recently moved my personal data to Nextcloud from Google Drive and it's been extremely pleasant to use

Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.

More information here:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover...

(0ct 2025)

Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app:

https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato

As a Frenchman involved in creating an open source Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) that can connect to any kind of storage and can expose itself as not only a web client but also SFTP, webdav and S3, with virtual filesystem capabilities and tons of other cool stuff, out of 60 customers, only 2 are French, the only people I see coming from France are only ever interested in open source because they don't want to pay anything (other countries in Europe are different though)

If anyone involved in this transition read this, please contact us, we already got open source technology to replace box / Dropbox / OneDrive and Gdrive

Just goes to show how many structural problems there are to starting tech companies in Europe.

Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.

There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.

Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.

It's one of the big ironies of the EU - every time it gets larger (good! increases market size) it also gets more fragmented in terms of languages, retained local rules etc. (bad, obviously).

Now up to 24 official languages and still potentially growing in the future (although this is a bit of an overcount because some of them are mutually intelligible to various degrees, it's still a lot).

It's interesting to think that at the time of original ECSC treaty there were only four languages (French, German, Dutch and Italian). That's just about manageable, now it is a bit of an issue

I've been working with European companies for a decade, language is not a barrier for scaling, local laws are.

E.g. why eu has some laws in terms of data and privacy, local laws take precedence (unlike in e.g. agriculture that it's entirely EU's business). Scaling across borders is expensive and difficult for regulatory reasons.

To be fair the US is not immune to that issue either, some states (looking at you CA) are very fond of making random extra state laws that don't exist at the federal level and affect commerce

Also culture. I had a friend try with several German companies, but she said the leadership would default to "no", and every decision would need too much review. She even worked with some that opened offices in SF hoping to learn to move fast, but even those were way too cautious to succeed. Lots of premature optimization, and trying to establish structures and systems before any proof of concepts could be made. Obviously, this is just anecdotal but she had a real desire to have European growth in SF communities.

I don't think capital is that much of a problem.

We have it, and it's been growing consistently.

What we lack is risk appetite, young people dreaming to be entrepreneurs, talent, a truly unified market, regulations and proper corporate law. Say what you want but stock options essentially don't exist in Europe, so you either give equity upfront or you don't at all.

My impression was that Europe had a lot of old money. A lot of traditional and family banks that were only willing to risk it on "a sure thing." The startups I did work at were the founders did a stint in SV after being recruited from Europe. Came back with the knowledge and culture of startups. Tried to replicate it there and ultimately couldn't climb out the bureaucracy.

The capital is locked up in traditional large multinationals. I've watched them launch one boondoggle after another. And it fail because of endless meetings and fearing to know their customers.

I kind of wonder, capital wise. the GDP isn't too far off US and there's def companies/families w/ insane amount of capital esp in luxury goods etc. Unless they're just hoarding it like Smaug and not investing it back into the economy, in which case the problem isn't capital but business culture.

European per capita GDP is half of the US average. Total GDP is between 60-75% of the US with an extra ~15% population. I'm sure Europe does have enough capital to do this build-out but its a shrinking pool as Europe loses ground to the US every year.

That seems to be the intention of https://mosa.cloud/

> Pricing starts at €199/month based on resource usage. We'll discuss your specific needs during onboarding.

Out of the question for very small teams; very hard to evaluate with no free/cheap option.

It could be similar to when China kicked out a lot of non-domestic players. They even had a nickname for it. From the link below.

Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口

n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.

https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...

> to sell support and customization of open source software to government players

Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.

I had an occasion to speak to some of the wire.com people a couple years ago. They seemed to be really dedicated to security and privacy.

Can you do audio calls with their free plan? They say no "audio conferencing", but I see a call button. And if I get the SMB plan, can I invite externals to a video conference or do I then have to pay for plans for them as well?

Yeah, this is a win/win opportunity and could drive more sponsorship of those projects as there'd be more interests invested in seeing them thrive.

If so it will be acquired by a US company

This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population.

I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.

As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.

>and no significant large technology companies

I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.

That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.

Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.

> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.

Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.

> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap

Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".

> Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp

Because it's very hard to compete against monopolies when there are network effects. What you can do is regulate them. The US government has been working very hard in the last decades to prevent that.

Recommended: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

"regulate them" has mostly translated to "tax the most successful players in the form of non-compliance fees from byzantine EU regulatory structures".

I don't think the thing holding back Europe's tech market is that the US encourages allies to not allow backdooring proprietary software, or the cries that it's unfair that the US doesn't strangle their own tech market with equally burdensome regulation. The problem Europe's tech industry has faced is that the EU killed it in the crib with regulations, and now there's more fear of "what if there are bad side effects in being successful" than there is fear of never being successful.

Yes, it'd be great if there was a thriving market of mid-sized EU tech companies working in a well-regulated and consumer friendly market. There just isn't, though. I'm generally a fan of Doctorow, but the idea that the EU is just a few hackers reverse-engineering a new client for teams/youtube/whatsapp away from that world is hard for me to see.

Taxing the most "successful" players and burdening them with regulations is exactly what is needed (provided those most successful players are large enough in size and few enough in number). There is room for more nuance in regulations in the sense that they can scale up more gently as companies grow, but the regulations on megacorps like Facebook and Google should only become more brutal. The existence of those kinds of companies anywhere in the world is a threat to people everywhere.

> I don't think the thing holding back Europe's tech market is that the US encourages allies to not allow backdooring proprietary software

"Encouraging allies" is a pretty damn generous interpretation of it.

Regarding what's "holding back Europe's tech market", I think that Europe has a different culture. Not having big monopolies is a feature, not a bug. In that sense, the regulations don't fail.

But it is very difficult to compete with monopolies unless you become one and lock your position. If the regulations prevent that (and again, that's a feature), then it becomes impossible.

Trying an analogy:

If we impose strict animal welfare rules on our own chicken farmers, that's a feature. But if we then allow unlimited imports of cheaper chicken raised with no such rules, it becomes unfair to our farmers, doesn't it?

>Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet?

Yes of course I can be honest. We don't have any of that. But if I'd sketch out a genuine European future in software to me it would look something like this. You have technologies like Tim Berner Lee's Solid[1] and social protocols like Mastodon/Bluesky/etc owned as public infrastructure and operated by its people. You could imagine each region of Europe having its own sovereign digital space federated with individuals owning their data, a genuine network mirroring the region as it is.

The big problem with this isn't just technical, it's mental. The user of today anywhere is a consumer. It's like turning a serf into a citizen. I don't think this is a five year vision, it's more like a 50 year program. I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.

[1]https://solidproject.org

> I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.

It will be way more than 50 years unless EU nations' governments start funding lean, savvy grassroots programs that invest in digital services like you say.

I'm talking a few thousands to local volunteer groups for the cost of hosting infrastructure or tax incentives to companies for actually providing this local infrastructure, not 50k to some bureaucrat in Brussels for drawing up plans to do so.

You're missing Signal which has gained a lot of traction in the last years.

Apart from that it's hard to take statements from such an ignorant US centristic point of view about what europe is/has/has not seriously.

Let's see how things will play out for europe and how our souvereignty efforts will impact the US economy.

Signal is also USA developed and funded, not sure why you're bringing that up?

-> ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares.

There is not ONE person that works in Finance or Accounting, at least in the US and Europe, that doesn't know "what SAP does", even if they have never used one of their products.

I'm just going to go out and say it: Europe is poor. At least compared to the US. You can see this plainly when comparing GDP per capita but it's particularly telling when you look at the revenue of tech giants, such as Alphabet and Meta. For example, Alphabet made roughly 50% of its revenue from the US and about 30% from EMEA in 2025.

Now compound that issue with conservative investors, a fractured "single" market and a strong preference for social equality over entrepreneurship.

> and no significant large technology companies

I can only assume this is a comparison to the US

The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.

Bigger is not always better

You say stuff like this, and then simultaneously complain when the US winds up owning the entire technology stack and being the predominate western superpower.

So which is it? Does scale not matter, or are you unhappy with the outcome of ignoring it?

Allowing the US to gain such soft power is the issue, not the size of a company. In fact, it would be even better for consumers if there were more standards and companies that compete by building against those standards. The fact that there is only one Microsoft is as much problem for the US itself as it is for others.

In any case, it's absolutely essential that the western world remove dependency on US technology.

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Sure, but at least you have homegrown car companies. They make cutting edge cars that are mainstream, and even popular abroad.

You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.

Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.

The US government has been working really hard on making sure that nobody can compete with the US Big Tech. See what Cory Doctorow has to say about this, for instance.

OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.

That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive. It was the right call, by the US, to put things in this way, but the European disadvantage is not for technical merits.

> This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive.

Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.

I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.

It's not for lack of trying but once such a massive attractor exists repeating the process is not necessarily possible because any local success can be bought out and then you have to start from zero again. The EU would have to instigate some strong protectionist measures and that's not its style, though it may well become a necessity.

And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.

In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.

Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.

> which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.

I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software, nor is being a majority contributor. These things are very obvious to anyone that regularly works with FOSS in a professional capacity.

Could you elaborate? <https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/digital-sovereignt...>

On a side and more general note: "Global Innovation Index 2025"

"Europe hosts 15 economies ranked among the global top 25, including six in the top 10. Switzerland (1st) retains the global lead, followed by Sweden (2nd), the United Kingdom (6th) and Finland (7th). Thirteen out of 39 European economies covered moved up the ranks, marking a notable increase from nine last year.

Notable movers include Ireland (18th), Belgium (21st) and Norway (20th), which breaks into the top 20.

Eastern European economies also show solid momentum. Lithuania (33rd) leads globally for unicorn valuation and digital innovation – with leading positions in app creation, ICT use and Knowledge-intensive employment.Europe is also home to dynamic innovation clusters, led by Germany with seven clusters and the United Kingdom with four, including Cambridge and Oxford. However, European innovation clusters trail the US in venture capital strength."

<https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2025/article_0009...>

The issue with these 'international'forums is that it's basically European countries tanking itself.

There's a meme going around online where it says "the world condemns..." On top and then a map of the globe with Europe and America highlighted.

Europe's issue is that it only considers itself.

Lithuania.. guys come on. And the Netherlands is not even in your list showing how ridiculous this entire thing is. As it goes most European lists of self congratulations are just moral rankings by their own standards

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Also, if you could cut down on the ideological battle stuff generally, that would be good. I'm not sure your account has quite been using HN primarily for that (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...) but it's close enough that you should probably recalibrate.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Here is another index, produced by US organizations. Take a look at the overall rankings. "Come one". I'm not sure why such an index isn't produced annually: it seems surprising. Most US data and reports tend to focus primarily on the United States (and not including any other economy), which is a separate discussion.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Innovation_Index>

> Europe's issue is that it only considers itself.

That may be one perspective. A similar point could probably be made about the US in some contexts. Europe, after all, is not a single entity but a collection of individual countries.

Bonus: A last index, done by IMD World Competitiveness Ranking. It is not an "exclusively American produced" indicator, but it is independent of European institutions and relies on international data.

<https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center...>

ps: Netherlands is ranked 8 in the list (IDK why you asserted it was absent). Moreover it is well covered in the first link I provided.

The problem is not ownership. It's dev force. We're not bad here in europe, not bad at all.

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It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)

After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.

Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...

Due to the way Microsoft does sales to enterprises, there’s no incentive for its software to be any good or even compete directly with anyone else… as long as it ticks the right boxes, the people making purchasing decisions are fine with it (it’s bundled in with something critical like Excel anyway).

If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.

This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.

Despite their confusion as to whether they want to really support their free and open source versions (without some absurd user count cliff), Mattermost (https://mattermost.com) is quite excellent and IMO is better than Slack. For example, editor leans towards native Markdown so things like syntax highlighting with backticks work as you expect.

Their recent update removed the paywall from SSO (and unfortunately the Gitlab SSO workaround) for social logins up to 100 seats, afterwards there's an absurd per seat cost similar to its non-open source brethren. One day if needed, I plan to drop-in an SSO middleman allowing anyone to leverage their own SSO layer (which will map to the login form with username/password) to avoid the SSO limits altogether. Though good enough for my needs, and likely yours too. Especially if you're open to paying for their seats.

Isn’t Zoom Chinese?

Anyway, I have been dealing with Zoom for over five years (like most folks). I don’t especially like it, but there’s really no viable alternative. Its video quality is light years ahead of anyone else, and its UI, though still klunky, has become a de facto standard. Everyone knows the UX, and is afraid to use anything else. Classic “the devil you know” conundrum.

I’ve found it really difficult to get non-technical people to use anything else. At one time, I could get folks to use BlueJeans, but that’s gone the way of the Dodo.

It’s a pretty common issue, when adopting FOSS alternatives. The UI is often optimized for FOSS lovers (tech people), not regular mensch. The tech may be great, but the UI is inscrutable. Tech folks just can’t seem to grok how important good UX is.

It’s actually a bit depressing, seeing this type of thing happening. It’s like a slow-motion trainwreck. Inevitable, unstoppable, and we can’t look away.

Good for France.

We've seen the US sanction the ICC, they have the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act. The US has shown both a willingness and a capability to weaponize your tech against you.

It should profoundly worry the world that three companies — whose heads all have frequent dinners at the White House — control virtually every phone, tablet, and computer in the world. If you expand that to data centres and clouds, email addresses, services and software it's far worse.

It should be considered a matter of national defence for basically all nations to ensure digital sovereignty.

(It doesn't matter who is in the White House, my point is it's a massive security nightmare to give this much control to one group)

I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.

Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company

Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this

The first sentence of the article:

> In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.

I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.

To me "homegrown video conference system" would mean like made in France by a French company, not made by the French government. I could be wrong but chat systems seem dynamic and important enough I wouldn't want it to be run and managed by the government. It will be interesting to see how it pans out though, and it's always nice to have more open source code

Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.

Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.

>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.

Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.

Early 2000s is exactly the time period when telecommunications companies in Europe were well on their way to privatization, if not already fully privatized.

You are proving my point.

Yes. And the result was shitty speeds on state telecoms and extremely fast in the deregulated market.

Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.

Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.

Is this true though? There are tons of policies and procedures the US government has required for decades that never got adopted by the private sector.

OS will be cheaper. No monopoly rendite + development across more shoulders.

You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.

I was going to say 'No way, profit > idealistic moral virtues'. But I could totally see Europe knee capping themselves. Look at how their food is inferior to the US because they stick to tradition.

I can totally see themselves doing this out of pride/humiliation.

Can we? Do you have any numbers to back this up?

Not direct numbers. But you can see r/BuyFromEU has 795K Weekly visitors. That is A LOT. In comparison, r/OpenAI has 676K Weekly visitors and r/webdev has 691K Weekly visitors.

Yes, and it's clear European governments are just catching up to the sentiment of European people.

> The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.

Ahhh, collaboration via Visio. Those were the days!

They named their video conference tool "Visio" ? lol

Meanwhile... Micro$lop: Aha! Sharpen your lawyers, mes amis!

I think this is one of the silver linings to this new era. By trying to renegotiate intolerable terms, the Americans are forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to make it all work without them. This will inevitably be a rough transition but it results in more worldwide resiliency and product/service options.

I think one question, which we might be seeing a bit here and there, is if the Americans decide that no, you can’t also do that. You must accept the intolerable terms or be punished.

The countries of the EU need to ask themselves why these software unicorns are not starting in their countries. Why do so many European entrepeneurs come to the United States to start their businesses?

The EU has a tendency to regulate business before they ever get started. They might want to look at their regulatory structure so companies like Zoom start in the EU, and not in United States.

How did they decide to name their Zoom/Teams replacement "Visio"?

There's already an extremely well known program called "Visio", namely Microsoft Visio, and it is included in many of the same Microsoft commercial office products that include Microsoft Teams. If you tell someone to switch from Microsoft Teams to Visio a lot of people will assume you mean Microsoft Visio and get rather confused.

let me fix this for you: l`Visio - but with a French accent ;)

Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.

Actually its now worth it to be building software in EU. It will have its market for sure

Good for them. More curious about file types and protocols, would their software output an open file type and "speak" open protocols? Let's say a French office needs to talk to a US office. Can each party use their own client and it still work, or does one party have to download the software of the other? The same with documents: can each party read the documents produced by the other?

Maybe it's just a PR stunt, maybe not, we'll find out in due time.

The thing is, there has been a lot of announcement like that in the past, but when the dust settles, you find out that every other ministry just signed another contract with Microsoft, so yeah.

The DINUM (the state agency behind these tools) just try very hard to be relevant, but in the end, the ministries are relatively autonomous in their choices.

This was always going to happen as soon as the USA decided to be overtly all about itself.

Tact and diplomacy meant that previously the USA was seen as, yes being all about itself, but not threateningly so when it came to its allies/friends. As soon as that veneer was removed the reaction was always going to be, "we'll look after ourselves then" - using the same tools China has (see: China having its own linux distribution)

Why not Jitsi - genuinely curious

Just a guess, but Jitsi having no governance structure outside of 8x8, Inc. might have something to do with it.

Just today, a citizens' initiative started collecting signatures in Finland to stop recent projects that aim to transfer hosting of election, taxation, and social security data on services provided by US-run companies.[1]

[1] https://digitaalinenitsenaisyys.fi/

Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.

Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…

Reminds me of the Zuckerberg quote from the film: "If you could have build Facebook, you would have built Facebook."

I don't think the main thing stopping an EU Zooms or Teams from capturing the market is not enough help from the French government.

This suggests governments need to commission infrastructure level dependencies directly rather than relying solely on the market and consumer behaviour, particularly given the poor outcomes in areas where there is little to no competition

Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.

There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.

France speaks for Europe? Heh heh heh...

France wants to really really reallllllyyyy believe they do.

Poland and Germany lets France say such fanciful words, but they keep their actual thoughts for themselves. They know France has an Adler inferiority complex, so they let them pretend.

Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.

EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents.

The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.

Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment.

Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.

In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?

Look I am all for Euro-skepticism, but "boycotting the best products" on an article about Microsoft Teams which is well known to be clawing its way into companies despite very negative feedback due to advantageous pricing when you are integrated with Office 365 (which is itself monopolistic behavior). Is not one.

The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.

In no world are Teams and Zoom anywhere close to the "best products". They're awful, and only persist because of network effects or because of "the people who buy it don't feel the pain".

The best products like Microsoft Teams? Let's be honest, a lot of the software they've replaced has a checkered past

This is a great reason to invest in open-source software.

Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?

Where are the businesses setting up and donating to an organization/foundation to pay for development of such a package?

Aside from email I think nextcloud (+ jitsi integration) covers most, if not all, of those requirements.

Nextcloud is great !

Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.

Cool. It won’t even be a blip on the earnings report. I guess a sales rep in Europe isn’t getting their preferred vacation this year. But other than that this is of no consequence.

I’ll still buy France’s wine.

Is this gonna go as well as when they built their own search engine?

I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.

France was one of the first to already adopt Matrix. However, when they began Visio, Element was embedding Jitsi for VoIP. Meanwhile Element built Element Call, which is somewhat similar to Visio (except E2EE and decentralised thanks to Matrix). Hopefully the two can converge :)

While I like the move, I think it could have come a few decades earlier and I'm stunned by the fact that this is Franc-only. When will Europe ever wake up?

[dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.

The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.

But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.

Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.

> But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies

Would you like for me to start counting the number of times the US helped install a democracy vs the number of times it installed dictatorships?

I’m well aware. (Probably any American who can name East Timor, let alone is aware of our participation in their genocide, is more likely than not to be familiar with our history.)

What you said doesn’t discount that we are better with free democracies, regardless of whether we see that through. Democracies tend to raise the per capita income across the population, which, in concert with free markets, gives our multinational corporations new markets to sell shit to.

Sometimes we have other more pressing concerns, like oil in Iran/Iraq (a democracy destroyed and created, respectively); global shipping / colonialism in our support of Israel in conflicts with Egypt over the Suez; abandoning our Kurdish allies to keep Turkey happy enough to keep military assets there.

Geopolitics doesn’t always do one thing or another, even if it were perfectly rational. And no foreign policy is that.

The absence of war in Europe is more down to the EU than the US. Polls do not consistently show anything of the sort.

Yes, they do:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-...

People globally have routinely acknowledged that:

1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs

2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc.

3. This is good

The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.

The poll you reference didn't ask a single country in the middle east (except Israel, of course!) or most of South American countries (half of which puppet governments were placed). I wonder why. And you really argue with a straight face that this is representative of "People globally"? I'd be more insulted by your attempt of slight if PEW wasn't doing the same.

I’m happy to review other data if you have it!

I’m not at all suggesting that the United States’s history isn’t fucked. I would suggest, though, that many people recognize that there are tradeoffs and having a single global superpower provides stability in exchange for freedom.

Yes, I’m aware of our history overturning democracies in South America or south east Asia due to communism or Iran because of oil. I’m also aware of efforts to install democracies (e.g. Iraq) not being about freedom. The people polled understand this as well.

I’m curious which counter factual reality you think would be better? Be specific as to what it would look like; who the regional powers would be; how they would cooperate / interfere with each other; what wars would look like, including frequency, between regional powers vs. today; whether states within their sphere of influence would be required to participate in these wars, etc etc etc.

Digital autonomy aside, I like the concept of something like "Microsoft apps, but without copilot".

Long time overdue. It is so stupid to rely on a single country in so many areas

so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)

For Teams-like chat I really like Zulip. Which also integrates with Jitsi for video conferencing

If you are hosting webinars there's also bigbluebutton

The French government built their own: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

"built their own" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product)

But you can see:

> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)

Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.

Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.

If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.

That might be true philosophically, but tactically it makes no sense to fork until a potential future license change. Why lose the free maintenance from upstream?

But they hosted the repo on Microsoft-run GitHub ...

The public-facing mirror :-)

Jitsi? https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.

Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.

(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)

This one is often overlook but very good, I prefer it over Jitsi https://galene.org/

what are the minimal server requirements? jitsi says prefer 8G ram (4G for small meetings) and 4 dedicated cpu cores https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...

The chat seems extremely basic, so not really an alternative if you need chat with e.g. message edit/delete/formatting/pictures as well as video/audio.

https://www.rocket.chat/

We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.

The Jitsi site says rocket.chat uses it.

I guess Jitsi?

https://meet.proton.me should also be ready for action soon.

This is AI enhanced workflows eating SaaS. I’d be scared if I ran a SaaS

This is SO exciting to see!

One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world.

Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give.

So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there)

Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious.

Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.

Too bad it doesn't have zooms echo cancelation / isolation

How many times are we going to see this same exact topic posted?

What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like?

I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley.

Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" operations? Create complementary tech ecosystems? Recruit Silicon Valley veterans and put them in charge, or just fire them after they get their tech?

Just look at how hard it is to come to a decision on something like allow Huawei to build a telephone network. Is it a good idea? Smart people say, Huawei should be allowed to provide the dumb pipes of the system, but not the high level stuff. Anything sensitive needs to be reviewed by domestic security services.

Is that the approach to America?

It seems like the article saying: "copy America's SaaS offerings." Not clear how that makes you digitally sovereign.

Airbus has been the most successful example I know of. Basically, clone off and slightly modify something another country has created, then force a large population to use it. It's like tariffs on steroids.

it’s gotta be too good to be true, but at least one major economy taking the lead, imagine

RIP: Zoom Public Sector AE, EMEA

Zoom and teams are low hanging fruit in terms of replacability. I use both with various customers. Internally we use teams. Occasionally somebody insists on webex or other tools. Meets isn't actually horrible now that Google seems to have stopped the internal battles to replace it every six months. But in the end it is very replaceable as well.

All of these tools cover the basics (being able to video call others, screen sharing, doing calls with multiple/many participants, chat, etc.). You can get most/all of that with free and OSS options. You might struggle a bit with larger meetings or some corporate networking situations.

UX wise, all of these tools are a bit challenged. It seems Google at least embraces the whole "it's just a browser app and that's fine" more than others that insist standalone applications are the way to go. And since these applications are effectively electron applications that run mostly fine in a browser, it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing in any case. Bloated is a word that is used frequently in relation to these apps.

It would be nice if tools like this could rally around federated solutions and open protocols. Actually, the smart thing for France (and other countries that care about ending the miserable status quo) would be to dictate usage of open protocols, identity, and security standards. You are welcome to connect with zoom, teams, meets and whatever as long as people not paying for those tools can still participate in a call using whatever compatible tool they prefer. Give these tools a chance to adapt and compete on features. The solution maybe isn't another app but just forcing this market out of the stone age of moats, "owning" user identities, etc.

Email is the one that got away before Silicon Valley got its act together. MS, Novel, America Online, and others completely failed to get their grubby fingers on the space before email was so widely used that not supporting full interoperability with non proprietary email servers was economical suicide. And they tried really hard. Video calls should be the same. And calendars. And word processors (a space that hasn't had any meaningful innovation in decades), spreadsheets, and all the rest. Most of MS Office is a commodity at this point. Not particularly good at anything it does actually. MS has been moving deck chairs around on the deck of that sinking ship for a few decades now.

If they also make US copyright not enforceable then they can have office clones and then it’s game over.

does Zoom still dump an unkillable web server into the bowels of your OS?

Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?

Just like Europeans, you need to understand international law. It's not law like law within a country. It's a warning. US software firms were never obligated to comply with anything. If you don't comply, you create an enemy. You comply based on your judgement of that enemies' ability, determination and level of creativity that they will use to punish you for noncompliance.

Do you want to do any business at all there? Do you have any vendors there? Do your owners own anything else that does business there? Do you have any investors that live there? Do your kids go to college there? Do you have to fly over or through it, ever?

It's leverage against leverage.

Is you don't comply, they block your ranges and legal recommends that you block customers connecting from those IP range.

(They're perfectly free to choose a different vendor on this their need for chat productivity and video.)

You are being denied the ability to sell to the French government, not denied selling into the market. Just like no one has "rights" to sell to the US government, you don't have any "right" to sell to any foreign government if they choose not to deal with you. And frankly it should be a matter of national security for governments to control the source and deployment of the software they use.

I am not being denied. They are being excluded from consideration for contracts there.

Fascist isn't fair. I shouldn't have said that. Fascism is when the government controls but does not actually own any or enough shares to control the means of production.

What a shame though. Should US exclude foreign firms (France,) from consideration for contracts for the same reason?

No doubt the tariff master has made this all better with cruel tit-for-tat leverage that caused loss for these US firms.

(EU just canceled aspects of GDPR etc, so it's not new privacy law?)

(Edit: Kushner is currently ambassador to France. Why wouldn't they trust US-based communication firms over there all of a sudden?)

Isn't it reasonable to block access to countries that deny you the option to compete and copy your business?

Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.

Should US businesses block all connections from countries which deny them the option to compete?

Does it matter whether a competitor in such a country is copying their business while they are denied the option to compete?

During covid I was studying in France. The school deliberately chose not to use zoom. It was software called BigBlueButton. I was happy with it. I appreciated them for having their own opinions instead of just following what others do.

How refreshing.

wonder why they didn't use jitsi

Imo this was inevitable even without Trump. He just massively accelerated it.

The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.

... and here I was thinking they're dropping them because they're annoyances ...

[Teams more than zoom. I just got switched to Teams at work and now I understand why no one ever chats on it.]

It would take less than one day for every European government, business, or individual to ditch Zoom and Teams without loosing any benefits: It's called a fucking telephone.

Well done, Trump and Musk ! ... Your people are proud of you.

Tourism, Tech, Tesla, Chlorinated Chickens (lol), ICE ... practically anything American sounds toxic overseas now.

Apologies to the good people of America. You didn't deserve this but your "democracy" has spoken.

As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.

Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.

America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.

Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US.

Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.

Latest leaks indicate the US will be given sovereignty over its existing and future bases in Denmark, along with oil drilling rights, at $0 to US tax payers. Some vassal indeed.

> It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

They should all give me their passports. I want in.

Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc...

https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive...

Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i...

> Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.

https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa...

> As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.

Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.

Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right...

A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...

Suprisingly the number does in fact seem to be roughly 80k per year, though a similar amount moved from Europe to the US.

https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/over-75000-americans-moved...

real source here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/migr_resfirst...

Thanks for the data, nice find!

Ok, let's take all of that as a given ... (and I've not clicked on one link, or read one line of it, so this is assumption).

Even after all of that... I'd still live in Europe any day of the week instead of your sh1thole country. How's your gestapo crackdown going? Your nation is currently as stain on democratic landscape. I hope you move beyond it.

You're welcome.

Your comment here is arguably illegal under UK law that prevents extremism based on violence, hatred or intolerance. Referring to someone as affiliated with the Nazi party arguably fits that bill. Please exercise caution...

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-definition-of...

You're wrong, but I couldn't give a shit, mate. None of us do... freedom of expression is a wonderful thing. Try it out sometime if your gestapo will let you.

But anyway, I'd have a fine, FINE time in court arguing the similarities of Hitler's finest and your ICE agents.

And don't get me wrong. Just because I call the USA a sh1thole on the ILS glidepath to a fascist state, doesn't mean I don't see the wrong in our countries.

The difference is, I don't turn the other cheek about my own country. I don't look in the mirror and lie to myself like some of you do. Pathetic.

And, AGAIN, even now, even with your evidence (which I didn't click on and couldn't give a shit about considering your comment adjacent to it) ... I'd STILL live here over that sh1thole with your pretend stormtroopers with their trigger happy fingers... hilarious how quiet your 2A fanatics and loud auditors are now.

Hell, half of them probably took that $50k signing on bonus while smoking a big fat one (the burning embers of your constitution).

You're barking up the wrong tree; I haven't lived in the US for 15 years. Looking at the crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, and the militarization of law enforcement during the Ferguson Riots when we had a black President was enough to confirm how the Empire's overseas oppression would eventually come home. It's a contributing factor to why so many military veterans (including us NON-WHITE ones) are happy to settle out here in Asia. I get to leverage the power of US dollar income to build a future for my children who's only connection to the US / "The Old Country" will be the revenue generated from their family property.

>> How's your gestapo crackdown going?

Same shit, different day when you are black. We're just looking at the white liberals who are now getting shot by The State's goons like "Oh, first time?"

I think your response is below the threshold of quality commentary for HN, but I didn't downvote it. It's better that it is as visible as possible, to serve as an artifact demonstrating the combined arrogance and ignorance that so often spews forth out of the mouths of Europeans.

Interesting perspective.

Ignorance? I'll call it assumption. Arrogance? No, just disgust.

And just like I assumed your background, so you assumed mine with the same level of precision.

I'll not call you a coward for lumping those who now suffer under your current pseudo-fascist government (because it still is your government). Ok, I will. When your fellow man or woman suffers under the same oppression you've suffered, you don't turn and run, you stand and fight, if you're able.

And it disgusts me that you look at those "white liberals" who will, and have, fought for you, and treat their deaths with pithy disdain.

Enjoy your retirement.

[dead]

... "your own Economics 101 classes!"

If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.

But that'd be difficult, and the EU is all about easy PR wins

lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.

What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.

Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.

Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.

And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).

There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.

Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.

I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/

I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).

The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).

We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.

Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.

>I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams.

Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.

It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.