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  • 🫧 Social coding commonssmallcircles@social.coop
    May 13, 2026, 11:15 AM

    @annehargreaves @glynmoody @EUCommission @Edent

    I do wonder about the source, and background. This page is updated 2 days ago, and does not mention the Open Source strategy:

    digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/

    Five days ago @NGICommons published, still features it prominently:

    commons.ngi.eu/2026/05/08/unde

    Was it just silently removed? Are there other announcements?

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  • 🫧 Social coding commonssmallcircles@social.coop
    May 15, 2026, 7:18 AM

    @annehargreaves @glynmoody @EUCommission @Edent

    In a 'fun' follow-up I might quote from the paper of Miranda Heath titled "A Report on Burnout in Open Source Software Communities".

    > Since OSS is the backbone of our critical software infrastructure, failure to address the problem of burnout in OSS also puts our entire software ecosystem at risk. Burnout is associated with a decline in work quality, threatening the gains in innovation and reliability from which we all benefit from when developers choose to make their code available open source.

    > Burnout is not just a problem for OSS developers, it is a problem for all of us. It
    is also a problem that can be most effectively addressed by working collaboratively to achieve system-wide change.

    mirandaheath.website/report-on

    PDF: mirandaheath.website/static/os

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  • Caleb James DeLislecjd@pkteerium.xyz
    May 13, 2026, 1:01 PM
    I don't know what their open source strategy said, maybe they didn't understand the value proposition of open source and so they removed it because what they had written doesn't make sense.

    Just at a glance, it looks like Europe is wanting to become the AI capital of the world, and the fab capital of the world, whilst also re-militarizing. But put in those words, you can kind of see it's not a working plan.

    TSMC basically controls the fab industry. They're currently in Taiwan, but the US is kind of just importing them wholesale - which obviously can work for the US.

    China has been throwing money in the fab fire for about a decade now, and they still can't compete. Europe has one advantage over China with regard to chip-making, and that's ASML. But even if you have the stepper, chip-making is such an insane business, if you're not THE BEST then nobody wants to make chips in your fab. Infrastructure buildout costs look like phone numbers, and it's very easy to build a production line which just NEVER works and it's a money pit forever.

    AI is the same kind of thing, there's two types of AIs: There's Claude and there's Not Claude. Nobody wants the second type. Now Claude took the crown away from ChatGPT, so clearly it's POSSIBLE, but it's the exact same problem as chips: You must invest more money than anyone else in the world, and THEN, if the gods are smiling on you, you MIGHT take the crown. But unlike chips, even wearing the crown doesn't make you profitable. All profit in AI is still theoretical.

    I feel like I'm telling a teenager that you can't become a doctor and a lawyer and a physicist and an astronaut. You have to pick one.

    Anyway, there are two strategies that actually do make sense, one of them is radical specialization and the other is ecosystem development.

    The way to the top is by out-investing everyone else in the world, so if you don't have Federal Reserve Infinite Money, you need to specialize. Be the best at something nobody else is paying that much attention to, because in that space, out-investing everyone is actually realistic. Advanced 3d printing, metrology, and gene-editing are examples of places where becoming a world leader is possible within a budget that is realistic for the EU. Europe is already the king of the coveted photolithography stepper, so expanding outward from that vertical is a clever approach.

    Ecosystem development is where open source strategy comes in. It's low margin, but it's also low risk, low cost, and has significant strategic value. To put it simply: Standards live and die by their adoption, and the lowest barrier of entry to adoption is open source. So there is an opportunity to promote European Values throughout the world by the subsidization of software and protocols which align with those values. The cost, compared to anything above, is incredibly low, a few thousands or tens of thousands of individual developer salaries for projects of 1-5 developers each. The risk is practically non-existent because there is no failure mode like "oops all the money's gone and nobody wants to buy it", each project is judged by its ability to gain adoption.

    For the past 20 years, Google has been Mozilla's largest donor. In that time, the market share of Mozilla Firefox has steadily fallen in favor of Google's commercial offering, Chrome. Many people accuse Mozilla of not being focused on the needs of the user, but from a cynical perspective one may say they have executed flawlessly - to the benefit of their patron.

    I'm not here to make accusations, my point is that funding an open source project and steering it into obscurity WOULD be a very effective strategy IF a tech company would choose to adopt it.

    So Europe must not take for granted any open source software upon-which Europeans depend. If Europe refuses to fund it, then one can only expect that American tech companies will - until it is so unusable that Europeans are forced onto their SaaS offerings.

    Again, I don't know what was actually written, and it may be far more reasonable than I am implying. But any European Digital Sovereignty strategy which recommends giving up support of open source in favor of two highly commoditized and extremely competitive industries, could be fairly accused of having been written in Washington.

    CC: @nlnet

    Consider this CC0, anyone can do whatever with any piece of it.
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  • Caleb James DeLislecjd@pkteerium.xyz
    May 13, 2026, 1:42 PM
    Yeah, the other direction is tech specialization, but without open source the whole "sovereignty" thing is really a house of cards.
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  • Caleb James DeLislecjd@pkteerium.xyz
    May 13, 2026, 1:55 PM
    It's also frustrating to see everybody follow each-other into these where I would not invest one penny because they are just so brutally competitive. And then on the other side you've got these incredibly opportunities just sitting there and nobody wants a part in them.
    Image attached toot
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