And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…

Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.

We're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA.

Every choice comes with a cost.

With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.

This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.

What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.

I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...

Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation

My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.

What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.

Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.

The irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS.

Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.

"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.

This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.

And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.