At the same time, the “World Wide Web,” composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.
It’s hard to be more European than the Web!
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Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?
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I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that “open” is every bit as ambiguous as “free” here - i’ve had way too many arguments with people who thought “open” just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was “open” just because you can look through the window and see products).
However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html
Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html
(That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)
All this nice opensource code still is executed on hardware owned (Intellectual Property/IP) by AMD/Intel/Qualcomm/NVIDIA/Apple. Having nice European-Open Source projects is not enough without the hardware layer and standards (instruction sets, drivers), which are owned IP by US cooperation’s.
Also one needs to consider cooperation between military-complex/secret-service and big-tech cooperation, which are basically hidden subsidies for the civilian part of the business. And if eu governments do not subsidize their own tech standards similarly they will get out-competed naturally.
SearXNG exists and Qwant is one search engine that I know of.
SearXNG is not a search engine, it’s a search engine proxy. The actual search engines that are being proxied are still the same old google, bing etc.
Qwant uses Google or Bing as a backend.
They have built their own index with Ecosia and are working towards fully using that but currently I believe they use a mix.
Making your own index is difficult and expensive. They’re doing the work and I think we should support them in that.
Mojeek is the only usable engine I know of that’s European and truly independent at the moment. But the results are not nearly as good as in Qwant.
SearXNG also runs on Google and Bing in the backend, and I can never seem to find an instance that works reliably.
I think the Qwant/Ecosia index focuses primarily on the French (and German?) speaking web to begin with, but I’m hopefull it will get good in all languages eventually.
Hmmm… Do they? Cant find anything about it
Do you really want a European Google?
We want what Google used to be (a really good search engine).
not Google Google, but a less shitty search engine
Just checking. 👀
The biggest reasons I see is that Europe is still a collection nation states whit each having it’s own language, culture, laws and needs, EU hasn’t removed those (yet, god forbid). There really is no single market for many services like there is in the US, in Europe you have to develop and sometimes apply for permits and licenses for each country even with the EU, since EU usually regulates retroactively not so much proactively.
The second is that there is nothing like the US federal government or military that could fund and/or bootstrap tech companies with contracts. Like google, SpaceX and Microsoft have both benefited massively from taking lucrative contracts from military government and US intelligence agencies in the past. Those allowed them to grow and consolidate first cover the US and then springboard themselves global.
in Europe you have to develop and sometimes apply for permits and licenses for each country
Honestly, EU Inc, announced at the WEF, is one of the few good things to come out of that mess. A single framework for running a business in all EU countries, meaning expansion across borders will be simplified enormously. Should allow for easier growth in the future.
