alt Hacker News> Europe does not need more open source,
Europe is not one country, not even the EU is perfectly united. It's a dozen different countries, each with their own political and technical landscape, and Open Source is seen as the logical solution to unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator.
> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.
It has a good software industry, and it could of course be always better, but USA is still bigger and more dominating. Ther eis also a difference between software and service. Popular Cloud-services for common work is rare in Europe, building them is and making them popular, especially on a european level, is important.
> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.
It's all about control. Open Source matters, becausse it gives more control, more insight, less chance some other country is spying on your and someday switching off something important.
> unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator
If you're afraid that one country might create a better software product/company and win the market and this would become 'unfair,' you've already lost the plot.
Instead of harnessing the best talent the EU has to offer, you're making sure they never get off the ground in the name of 'fairness.' Tall poppy syndrome in the extreme.
I'm sorry but the free market-denial that's become endemic among European central planners is getting wildly irrational at this point. Every year we creep closer to USSR-level government spending as % of GDP, crowding out private sector activity.
Do you understand that the entire tax base of the EU is dependent on private sector businesses competing with each other to offer better products and services? Unfairness and exceptionalism and its winners are what funds our entire way of life.
We can redistribute some of the earnings from the winners to the losers after the fact (as we already do at 50% on average). But we absolutely need to have the market competition to drive value in the first place for there to be anything to redistribute!