Open letter: ~100 EU companies urge EU lawmakers to take “radical action” to shrink the reliance on foreign infrastructure by fostering a so-called “Euro stack”.

www.theregister.com Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape US dependency

: Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions

[PDF] Letter.
Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions

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Just use open source. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I’m a full stack developer and I’ve never given Microsoft a dime.
Well, truth be told, my gaming PC came with Windows and I did buy Flight Simulator but I felt dirty after and some of the silly airplane peripherals weren’t working right with Fedora so I kept it dual boot. That was before Steam Deck and Proton, though, so I should probably test it all again.
- This is surprisingly myopic from someone who supposedly works in the field.
  Where do your full stack applications run, my friend?
  Because unless you're in China or Russia, the answer is either AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
  Nobody is looking to reinvent the wheel. The call is for the EU to invest heavily in infrastructure, like building its own chips, creating its own data centres, and yes, developing its software industry to provide alternatives to all the proprietary/closed stuff.
  
  Nobody is forcing you to use the cloud, you can host your apps on your infrastructure. Of course the cloud has its uses, but I think it is way overutilized and many companies could save quite a lot of money if they returned to on premises.
  
  true epically for smaller companies. Some really big companies like the could because they need to network all their 100 plus buildings. There is also externalizing responsibility and costs. But a doctor's office as no need for the could. But they all just pay for azure to get ms office.
  Honestly I would be surprised if micro or on site cloud solutions becomes a real things for smaller sites.
  
  Running on prem is certainly possible, but requires a dedicated sysadmin team for anything serious. It is very important to be able to have availability guarantees and some expert you can count on to solve your problem with a phone call.
  
  Running the stuff on someone else's computer still requires a dedicated team for "something serious", unless you stuff everything in specific "serverless" platforms, in which case you're still paying for admins, just not yours.
  
  It's really not that hard. I'm the IT department for a medium sized bakery operation. Around 200 employees. This just means that I'm available when it really is necessary. I'm in situ or on call when orders come in and when shipments go out.
  In the end I'm cheaper than outsourcing all the in house software and hardware. And I'm available at 3am when the bakers do their thing.
  And yeah, I do have somebody somewhat trained in every bakery. When they're at end of their wit I'm the person they call.
  In the end, I'm around 1% of the payroll. IT is not that special.
  
  Brother. I work in a company with 10k workers. The company loses thousands of dollars per second of downtime, if it's something that affects the availability of the main page or the checkout process.
  If that happens during the peak season, it could be hundreds of thousands per second.
  With those kinds of stakes, you don't just jerry rig your hosting, and very frequently, you don't take your chances with in-housing.
  You put it in one of the big 3, because they don't fail, and if they do fail you, you sue their ass.
  
  I mean, often enough even that phone call won't help.
  But you're right, as long as everything is working normally, working on premises slows you down to do maintenance, updates etc etc. Cloud (of all kinds) takes that work away and you can work faster. And in the VC-driven daily and eternal grind, moving faster is the only thing that matters.
  
  As a software house, running our own infrastructure would be a nightmare in so many ways... Just thinking of all the hardware that needs to be deployed, and how many sites worldwide we'd need just to provide the same level of service we have now, and then being able to scale up massively during peak time but have all that capacity go to waste during low season, then dedicated teams on all sites to handle emergencies 24/7, the massive loses of revenue anytime the services are down...
  "Just in-house it" is definitely not the answer, there's a reason AWS makes so much money.
  
  I’m going to give a sincere answer.
  Usually AWS (or Vercel and Mongo Atlas if it’s a Node/MongoDB situation or an early dev situation). I forget all the brand names the other cloud providers use and have to do a search for “EC2 equivalent Azure” or whatever. You can’t be an expert in everything, after all. Plus, Azure has admin pages where I have to use Chromium instead of Firefox and it’s like, “Come on, assholes.” I don’t mind Google Cloud but it’s rarely cheaper and I can’t justify it to someone paying me.
  I know Amazon is evil. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription — I lived in DC so I kept it longer than most would — because Jeff Bezos is a fucking menace. But you kind of have to pick one or keep a chart on your desk with all the different brand names and what equals what.
  
  Thanks for the straight answer, brother.
  
  Would absolutely love to see the EU fix the fedual kingdom style Interfaces of US cloud offerings. Like you can use things like Rancher to create a open interface that Interfaces with the absolute mess that is AWS/Azure/GCP/VMWare but it's just because they want to pretend their all just so special, which it's just network and compute for 99% of the time and the other one percent established open source software preconfigured on network and compute
  Don't get me wrong hyperscailing infrastructure is fucking impressive to me (and the EU should lean with Open compute there IMHO), but the Interfaces I swear are intentionally garbage to lock people in.
- As someone who has worked in the tech industry near Seattle, I don't know how well known it is to the wider populace or people in Europe, but open source is absolutely anathema here. It's seen as insecure, unstable, and unreliable.
  I work in IT so I've tangentially worked across a number of sectors supporting their stacks and it's pervasive within the American culture. There is a major de-prioritization of in-house IT knowledge and sysadmins in favor of enterprise support contracts. When shit hits the fan, it's less important to have a knowledgeable team and more important to have a foot to stamp down on until the issue is resolved. Often that foot has another foot that stamps down, onward and onward until someone manages to engage the MSP or cloud provider that set the service up initially with their scant documentation.
  It's a nightmare both for tech workers and from a cyber security perspective. A lot of this contains my own personal bias and perspective on the matters, but let me say, I have stared into the void and I can't stop screaming.
  
  I definitely learned that working with a law firm once. I could have set them up something more secure with an open source stack but what they really wanted was a company to blame if things weren’t as secure as I promised.
  I imagine that’s why a lot of governments and big companies pick a big corporate vendor when it’d be cheaper and better to hire people. There’s less liability if you can blame a vendor than a specialist in the event something goes haywire.
  
  as someone getting into the it field. My current employer could make more of their IT department in house but they don't want the responsibility of that that want someone ELSE to take the blame when something fails.
- You monster. How dare you call youself an open source enthusiast. Turn in your badge and gun.
  /s
- MSFS 2020 runs fine with proton and my thrustmaster gear. 2024 still has a lot of issues to my knowledge, I haven't tried that yet.
- European countries already have a lot of open source software grants tho can you imagine if all thay money that goes to Microsoft and co would go to open source? That'd be crazy.
  I'm a full stack dev as well and contemporary software is really not that hard given proper funding and structure. There's nothing open source can't replace.

25 comments