European companies like Airbus, Dassault, and OVHcloud apparently want Europe to reduce its dependence on US tech companies.

Thoughts?

  • ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    56
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source - public money, public code! The only way to take down these giant US companies is to work together, and the most effective way to work together is to release everything in the open in such a way that anyone can build on top of it.

    If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US. It wouldn’t increase productivity in the long run, it would instead substitute dependency on a few US companies for a few EU companies.

    But, if they invest in open source software, it could spur innovation not only in the companies that are directly funded, but also thousands of other companies throughout the EU that would now have common infrastructure that they can build on top of.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      10 days ago

      I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source

      That’s not how the game is played. You absorb the public losses. But they privatize the gains. Otherwise, there’s no deal.

      If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US.

      That’s the goal, yes.

    • peches_et_creme@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      10 days ago

      I’ve been thinking for awhile now how cool it would be for a country like the U.S to have a public sovereign wealth fund. There are certain industries where the typical free-market enterprise just doesn’t work (such as essential healthcare, infrastructure, food, maybe housing, etc.) Perhaps there could be some kind of public option business that competes in the market with fair prices and an idealized model of doing business.

  • شاهد على إبادة@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    Multipolarism is good for everyone. Even if you hate the EU, it is a good thing for no single country to dominate everything from culture to technology.

  • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    11 days ago

    Learn from the best of the US example and leapfrog from using opensource and the best of the Chinese example using open hardware.

    There are so many places where good FOSS and FOSH investments can act as public infrastructure for an entire economy. After that just fostering good education so that more people can leverage and improve on it and we might really see a Renaissance

    • citizen4509@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 days ago

      Well, I saw an article some time ago about a company going back to on premise and I guess there may be some movement there, not sure how big it is. Cloud can be great but can also be expensive and kill your company if done with premature scalability in mind or simply by careless engineers.