alt Hacker NewsI find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts.
On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.
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Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others).
> there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated
Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.
There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.
> On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
> I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired
I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.
Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
> It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American.
This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
Computer software is so incredibly cheap in a business setting (that includes public sector) compared to all other tools and expenses, that it always makes sense to pay for and use the most feature complete software you can get.
Its. You know. Look around. What our elites and noble families concot. Wirecard. etc.
I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting.
While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.
You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.