It’a decent step but what we really need is competition.
Fund a FOSS competitor to the iPhone and Android like the PinePhone, Librem, Firefox and Ubuntu phones (both discontinued). We even have Fairphone based in Europe who could deal with the manufacturing, etc. – then it’s a lot easier to press Apple and Google on the monopolistic App Store practices, etc.
This is also critically important for reducing electronic waste – enabling repairability and aftermarket repairs and mods. Same for a repairable, upgradeable laptop like the Framework, shipped with Linux. We have to move away from the current mentality of just throwing away electronics every year or two.
Likewise with some sort of secure messaging service – make sure that foreign nations aren’t storing all of our citizens’ private messages. Maybe work with Matrix, Signal, etc. to achieve that.
Same for a cloud provider – perhaps something like Fermyon for wasm containers over VMs, etc.
Unless we take the fight to them, we’ll be forever at their mercy. From the ZX Spectrum and ARM to Linux, MySQL and MariaDB – Europe has had great technical achievements, and it’s a great shame that we’ve ended up in this position of being entirely dependent on the American Tech sector.
2 comments
I wish we could do the same here…
It’a decent step but what we really need is competition.
Fund a FOSS competitor to the iPhone and Android like the PinePhone, Librem, Firefox and Ubuntu phones (both discontinued). We even have Fairphone based in Europe who could deal with the manufacturing, etc. – then it’s a lot easier to press Apple and Google on the monopolistic App Store practices, etc.
This is also critically important for reducing electronic waste – enabling repairability and aftermarket repairs and mods. Same for a repairable, upgradeable laptop like the Framework, shipped with Linux. We have to move away from the current mentality of just throwing away electronics every year or two.
Likewise with some sort of secure messaging service – make sure that foreign nations aren’t storing all of our citizens’ private messages. Maybe work with Matrix, Signal, etc. to achieve that.
Same for a cloud provider – perhaps something like Fermyon for wasm containers over VMs, etc.
Unless we take the fight to them, we’ll be forever at their mercy. From the ZX Spectrum and ARM to Linux, MySQL and MariaDB – Europe has had great technical achievements, and it’s a great shame that we’ve ended up in this position of being entirely dependent on the American Tech sector.