alt Hacker NewsI think (or maybe hope) that open source is going to be a large part of the European data sovereignty strategy.
America has had decades to privately run and develop their own software alternatives and everything (Windows, Office, Google) is extremely deeply established now and hard to compete against. I mean, can you imagine building a proprietary x86_64 operating system from scratch not based on Linux? And writing the code is just a small part of the work. You also need drivers from manufacturers like Realtek and Nvidia. You need people buying your product. You need marketing.
It's just not going to happen. Open source is the only way forward for EU, in my opinion.
And therefore, I think you will be able to contribute as much as you want to these open source efforts. Even testing and translations are already great initiatives, but if you can also write code, that's even better!
I am a bit more interested on the side of infrastructure though (having the idea in backburner playing with ways of having direct ssh firecracker vm's with docker images)
Usually I try to open source it & release it usually in permissive licenses (Full disclosure to experiment with ideas I use LLM's sometimes)
I don't really want Europe to replace America only now switching to India. Our ideals might match right now but y'know we live in a multi polarized world now and we just have to look for what's great for Europe from European perspective and so on & as an Indian, I appreciate it given that we have points of common interests regarding privacy.
So my point was that I already open source projects. But the reason I feel a lot of issues is that open source project -> actual deployment pipeline is still messy for the average person and this is the idea I was / still am targeting with firecracker vm's where someone can pay for an open source service to be deployed on vps for some time (Alright now a lot of options have come like sprites but i have been talking about from 2-3 months maybe 4 back when no implementation existed and even right now the one click button solution ui/ux I wanted to create still hasn't been created)
Like instead of being bound to your service with tos as a saas, I am hoping to treat each as a vps and the tos which would surround that which would be more permissive.
I was gonna build more on it but then ramflation happened so probably gonna have the idea internally till the bubble bursts or when its good enough (a big chunk of me not open sourcing it is that its really hacky and consists huge LLM help right now especially with gliderlabs/ssh library part & I don't want to create yet another AI slop)
I know hindi (the most widely spoken language in India) and I am down to provide some translations to Open source too
The issue with Open source without any offering is that (i have written about it) is that there is zero funding and incentive. Heck, I am the person who made a post about how to promote open source/fix this issue & After months of thinking, I kind of feel providing EU privacy friendly solution might be the best bet. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430) [Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that]
A lot of it felt like a chicken and egg problem to me. People want better UI/UX but developers build for dev first and there needs to be a real incentive in most cases to have great UI/UX which might include some financial benefits plus open source still has some large issues in funding which is why I thought of the cloud idea as well (I want to establish a railway like pricing model where you get charged for what you use but its still reasonable and there can be a deploy to cloud option and developers who create open source projects gets the funding in first place or have a more flexible way to earn from their project, similar to BYOK but way more user friendly)
Anyways my point is that I feel deeply aligned with EU right now. I just want to ask for some EU laws given I am still living in Indian state right now and just more information about it.