Posted by s_dev 1/23/2026
I haven't found anything public about where its hosted
or:
whois "$(ping -c 1 techposts.eu | awk -F'[()]' '/PING/{print $2}')"
You're confusing Europe and the EU
You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
Yes, and that's precisely the irony. Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
Do you have a single clue about Europe? That's not true at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
Besides that, besides my native language and English, I had German and French in school (which are required topics in our country). So I can speak the native language of all nearby countries.
Auf Wiedersehen!
In short, it's just like Chinglish.
In both countries English is only one of the official languages.
:P
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate
But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).
And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).
Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.
And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.
Have you tried any Scandinavian country for instance?
The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”
The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.
Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.
The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to me, I get it, and it's easier to refer to Europe as "the other" rather than having to use a longer phrase to describe traveling from the British isles to the mainland of continental Europe.
But still, it amuses me.
Being able to string together a couple of sentences is not "being fluent." By that standard, all of America would be fluent in Spanish.
I did hit a funny situation in rural France once where I was talking to a French restaurateur through one person who spoke French and Spanish, and then a second person who spoke Spanish and English. It was convoluted, but it worked enough to get me a meal. Alternatively, when I was in rural Spain, near the French border, a French speaking lady desperately tried to get me to help translate for her since she didn't speak Spanish and the merchant she wanted to talk to didn't speak French. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English. The best I could do was communicate to the merchant in my broken Spanish that I couldn't help.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
Totally. All Northern countries to be fair. And then in my experience at least some Eastern countries (like Slovenia).
Really it seems like the South of Europe is a bit weaker in English, my guess being that their native languages are latin and not germanic (so it's further away from English).
The bigger countries do dubbing and it is really noticeable.
Also in Holland we'd pride ourselves on speaking foreign languages much more than being proud of our own.
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.
Java is FOSS by the way, however it is also a good example, its runtime capabilities isn't the product of long nights and weekends.
To the extent that my employer blocks Oracle dot com at the outbound firewall to stop anyone accidentally incurring license costs. You don't want to deal with Oracle license enforcement.
Oracle cannot be blamed people are unable to understand the difference between OpenJDK and Oracle Java installers.
OpenJDK also happens to be developed mainly by Oracle employees, circa 80% of contributions.
We can worry about feature growth later, if at all. It may be age finally changing my preferences, but so much of what I've seen sold as "new" in tech in recent years has been either worse than what I already had or a reinvention of something that already existed. Like, contactless payments were already a thing before they were available in phones, and social media didn't start with FB and twitter, and Apple's API updates in the last few years feel like as much of a downgrade to me as their icons seem to be to UI blogs.
What was the problem between Android and Java then? Wasn't there some dispute between Google and Oracle on that? Genuinely interested.
Sun did not sue, because they were out money already, and Oracle used the argument they were using Apache clone implementation of Java, with copyrighted headers.
To this day you cannot pick a random Java library and have it run on Android.
Even after having won, they refuse to implement full compatibility.
Because of the licence or because it won't work? Sounds like the latter, but I have never seen a Java library that unexpectedly did not run on Android.
Hardware vendors is a different issue
Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?
For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
There's C++ if you want something that has an international standard.
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
Also, Qubes OS exists.
Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.
I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.
So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.
But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
The way things are going it becomes a national security issue where those PR are coming from.
And TBH IMO such projects should be avoided in the first place regardless of what US is doing because they tend to use FLOSS as a marketing method than for practical development. Choosing projects which have multiple shareholders, so to speak, is much healthier in the long term.
Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.
Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
The alternative that's looking best to me so far is Kolab Now. I don't see a lot of user reviews of it on Reddit though, or anywhere else, so it seems to not be very popular at first sight. That's perhaps not a good sign.
In any case I'm planning on trying it out for a while, with a domain I don't use it all that often, before deciding to migrate to it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
Also, the GPL is not as short and has more explicit wording for how it behaves in common situations (like the P2P copying stuff, for example), and it allows certain additional restrictions and exceptions (like what the LGPL is). It's just more well thought-out in my opinion.
Edit: Reading it again, I also just remembered that the EUPL's warranty disclaimer is a lot weaker than usual licenses, and weirdly also asserts the program is a “work in progress”.
Keep in mind that within EU the GPL's copyleft is as strong as EUPL's or LGPL while at the same time EUPL takes into account network access like AGPL. In practice though, software is distributed outside of the EU and while GPL relies on local laws to "maximize" its copyleftness, EUPL specifically refers to either the EU country of the developer or Belgium if the developers from outside the EU, where the laws do not distinguish between static or dynamic linking (check "More details on the case of linking" from [0] about license compatibility). Also FWIW while FSF suggests that "license hopping" (i.e. changing to some compatible licenses from EUPL to something else) weakens the copyleft, a European Commision lawyer who worked on EUPL has commented doing so would be copyright infringement because the purpose of the compatibility list in EUPL is for interoperability (so that multiple projects with different licenses can coexist) and the purpose would matter in court.
Though in practice since software is often distributed outside of EU, e.g. to US where (it seems) such distinction does exist, people do respect (L)GPL's dynamic vs static linking requirements and from a worldwide perspective EUPL is something like LGPL with a dash of AGPL (making some program functionality available even remotely is considered as distribution). Or in other words, EUPL is basically AGPL within the limitations of EU law.
[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/li...
Can you elaborate on that?
My understanding is that EUPL is a bit like MPLv2 or LGPL in the spirit. Like it protects the project itself, but doesn't go viral like the GPL.
However, the compatibility clause allows relicensing to other licenses that are explicitly weaker in their copyleft, which is what I meant with the quoted sentence.
Another comment just made me aware though that apparently, copyleft extending to other programs linking with the work is just not a thing in the EU? I'll have to read more into the details of that.
----
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.
> But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software.
Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc.
See this case of a French judge from 2025:
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.
That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.
Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.
I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.
As long as housing is extremely expensive in Europe, nothing else matters except for higher salaries.
That isn't true unless you're looking to rent a luxury apartment in a big city.
All of this was just on normal health insurance and with normal clinics and hospitals.
Never did she have to wait more than perhaps 3 weeks tops for an appointment.
The medical system here is world class.
However Germany and it's infrastructure can not be compared to the Netherlands. I refuse to take trains through that country anymore.
In which country are the trains bad? Netherlands or Germany? Do you care elaborating why? is that punctuality? strikes? decaying infrastructure?
I was talking about Germany's infrastructure. Last year I had 3x separate trips turn into chaos due to how broken their system is. Broken trains, broken track infrastructure etc. Think multiple hours on each trip rather than just 10 minutes delay.
The Ditch system is very reliable in contrast.
For healthcare if you get an IT salary you can either move to private insurance, or buy additional insurance, or just pay a consultation yourself for a fee that US people won’t believe.
the system is breaking down in front of our very eyes.
i am not living in Germany. i moved to fthe NL, but the situation is very similiar.
My father had to go though multiple appointments and analysis to get his prostate and hernia checked. Never waited more than a week and paid 0 in total. Before, he'd probably only have to wait a couple days for appointments, but the stress the healthcare system is currently undergoing is abnormal due to the more aggressive cases of flue this season. All things considering, things are not "breaking down" (I'm even getting some second hand embarrassment reading those words).
Same in France, it can take a while to get an appointment to see some specialists nowadays. There's a clear decline there.
But if you have something bad, they'll treat you in time. Actually, a relative of mine has been diagnosed with cancer a not long ago. She got several surgeries and all the treatments with no wait, and at not cost.
There's no reason why it shouldn't be sustainable.
How does that compare to the public transport situation in the US?
Like Spain's commuter trains?
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
Biggest problem has been talent going to US.
This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.
The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.
It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.
I hear that argument a lot, and honestly it sounds uninformed and downright disrespectful. Some kind of "I am a US developer, we US developers are the best, and the few good European engineers come here. The remaining ones in Europe are dumb".
Not to mention that I have talked to quite a few European engineers who could earn a lot more by moving to the US, but just really don't want to live in the US. Maybe there is a reason for that?
This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.
European military. Why do some people act as if European countries had no armies?
And even if we had no armies and Russia attacked and totally destroyed us, how is it related to the topic discussed here, which is whether the influx of European engineers to the US will continue or not?
> This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.
Perhaps. I don't think it is, but let's say you are right. How is that relevant? People do not want to go to a country they perceive negatively. Whether that perception is an objective fact or hysteria is, in this context, immaterial.
What would happen is that Russia invades Poland, or Russia invades Romania or Bulgaria or something. Those are Eastern European countries. (I mean they all used to be Soviet bloc anyway.) Or Russia would invade Germany like the good ol' days. So whatever nation they invaded would sic their own armed forces on them, and their allies' too. NATO could jump into the fray.
Americans (and perhaps Russians too) often misunderstand how terribly small European nations are, really. They're mostly smaller than individual United States. So, less population, less time to transport stuff, fewer natural resources available in a sovereign context, etc. But lots of national borders.
So Russia won't invade "Europe" but they could go into one or more nations on the list.
The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.
Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.
Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.
You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.
I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.
I'm a freelance, and I take fun jobs, not jobs that pay well.
But maybe culture and quality of life should not be ignored :-).
Quality of life is also a cultural thing. I know it's hard to understand for US people (I truly believe it is the case for cultural reasons), but many people really don't want the lifestyle of the US for all sorts of reasons. For some people, quality of life means easy access to healthy food, or to nature, seeing trees instead of giant concrete parking lots or 6-lanes highways, etc.
I can tell you (I live here) -- there are none. SF is one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, and I'm trying my hardest to visit as many cities on earth as possible.
After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.
Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.
[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.
See, Google Zurich vs Seattle
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Hm, after carefully reviewing the entries seem more or less the same, Zurich slightly lower.
Which should not be an issue, if as I read a lot in this page, "all good European engineers move to the US". It means that you only have to compete against the "bad ones" that stayed back, right? /s
I just left Seattle Greater Area and my 350sqm admittedly old house + a small ADU with an outdoor pool went for $2M (at the moment it was a downturn, so maybe $2.5M tops now). What can you get for that money in Greater Zurich Area? A 100sqm flat?
Also, most mortgages in Switzerland are very peculiar: you pay 20% down, but then you don't ever pay off the principal, only interest on the remaining 80% which is owned in perpetuity by the bank. The interest rates are kept very low and the currency quite stable, because most of the citizens rely on it. So your monthly interest could be 400-500 CHF, and you invest the rest however you prefer.
much larger, much closer to everything, almost an acre of land
The rail network in and around Zurich is reliable and punctual, so you can live anywhere along that 30km long lake and still have your commute be 30-40m, without needing to search for a parking spot and whatnot.
I experienced this myself when I was briefly commutung from Pfäffikon(SZ).
So how long will the culture last?
I had offers from companies across the pond, and likely could make about 2x-3x what I make here.
What for? I live a comfortable life here.
Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.
When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.
I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.
As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.
- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.
- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society
- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.
- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.
- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.
You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.
Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:
- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people. - China - Iran - New Zealand - Australia - Canada ...
Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.
Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.
Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.
Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.
You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.
It's just crazy. I went to the Estonian embassy in Berlin, was offered coffee, and 20 minutes later I had my digital card allowing me to create a limited company.
I tried to create a category here if it is useful for others as well: https://european-alternatives.eu/admin/category-votes/3daefd...
Oh, and here's the product page: https://val.build
GitHub is here: https://github.com/valbuild/val