Nice try feds!

Why? I’m not against developers getting paid to do FOSS work. It’s far more reasonable than the whole “bazaar of free people”-model that lives entirely on ideology.

and let’s not forget - systemd, which has RedHat money backing it up.

It’s been 12 years since Heartbleed and we’ve had numerous ”lone maintainer” issues since then. The situation shouldn’t come as a surprise or be especially ”hard to believe”.

This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.

Unless the creators manage to roll some kind of ”commercial” version, it’s not very sustainable in the long run. Turns out many eyes don’t really equal many PRs

And EU could also anti-trust regulate US companies operating in the EU-zone.

ideally any European tech companies wouldn’t replicate the enshittification of America’s big tech companies.

But they will (just look at Spotify) when given the chance. Companies exist outside our real and ideological borders. They are products of capitalism. The way to control them is regulation, worker rights and agency. Trying to appeal to their sense of morality won’t work. They don’t have any, they’re companies.

Sure. We should have alternatives to the big US tech companies, but so should the US. There should be innovation and competition. But it’s not going to materialize by just telling people we should “buy European”. The only way to get away from this situation is through strict, enforced anti-trust controls and laws demanding interoperability.

Europe has a tech sector. But instead of feudalistic, large"European" services, I think it would be great to have plenty of smaller national tech service sectors that would serve the needs of their respective markets, near those markets. The tech service market doesn’t have to be European for any other sense than being open for competition (since we have freedom of labor within the union). There are plenty of local cloud (IaaS/SaaS) providers in most European countries, but it’s hard to compete against global monopolies, be it global, American or just EU-wide. We should have strong laws and political lobbying against that - so if EU wanted to be useful, it could try to hinder these companies from operating within the EU market and prohibit new ones forming in EU. But this seems to be quite hard in our - very broken - “European democracy” (and by that I mean EU Parliament).

And establishing a healthy, innovating tech service sector only gets the ball rolling - the real problem in tech sector is chip manufacturing and access to raw materials. I think that’s hard to solve without reliance on China.

There are problems to solve. But I don’t think solution to any of them is “let’s import U.S success culture”. or “let’s have European big tech companies”. We need different models.

So let me get this right? In order to “feel European” we need to have huge tech companies that aim to dominate the global market so we can all feel proud when we see their office logotypes in all the cities we visit?

That’s the vibe of the “success culture” we want to build?

Should be easy, just allow monopolies and let companies gobble up their competition without question. Weaken worker power and agency and then fail to regulate interoperability and bang, we have our own tech giants as well.

Let me expand on this a bit:
Monopolies / lack of competition — When platforms dominate markets, they no longer fear losing users or business customers to rivals, which emboldens them to degrade quality.

Weak worker power / agency — Tech workers once had leverage to resist harmful design or policy choices; as layoffs and labor fragmentation eroded that leverage, platforms faced fewer internal pressures to restrain “enshittifying” moves.

Erosion of regulation and interoperability — Regulatory bodies have been captured or weakened, and technical constraints (like the ability for third parties to interoperate or fix products) have been removed or outlawed. Without strong regulation or the ability for users and competitors to interoperate, platforms can enforce lock-in and extract more value without consequence.

This is what we’ve come to call “enshittification” and it’s the trademark of all the major platforms you mentioned. If this is what you want from “Europe” then just let me get off this “success train” before it leaves the station.

Ok, so when we talk about more integration on EU level, in order to establish “success culture” - what kind of integration are we talking about?

Even on EU level, we’re 27 sovereign states, with many different languages, currencies and most importantly cultures. It’s not really even remotely analogous to current day USA.

Maybe Europe should have more integration so it can better stand up against the US, China, and Russia

Just highlighting that, because it was the point of of message. Russia is part of Europe. “Europe” as a term is about as muddy as “America”.

What is this “Europe” everyone is talking about?

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the “success culture.”

What does that even mean? Europe is 44 countries with VAST number of languages and cultures. It includes Russia by the way. This recent trend of comparing “Europe to America” like they were somehow equivalents and talking having “European alternatives” is a strange piece of feudalism. And now this imaginary Europe doesn’t seem to have “success culture”. Of course it doesn’t because Europe where such thing could exist is just a fever dream.

Europe is not EU either. And even if we’re talking about just EU, it’s really not one homogeneous cultural entity either, it’s 27 sovreign countries, each with their own cultures tied very loosely together in a monetary, free-market union, nothing more.

I don’t know why we’re romanticizing USA by comparing some imaginary European equivalent to it?