It's cool they're trying to draw attention to European alternative but who is this information targeting anyway? Bean counters and execs have the final say in these decisions and they never read stuff like this.
Every EU company I ever worked for, from big multinationals to start-ups, mostly used US software and/or US/Chinese products anyway, even though engineers already knew there are FOSS/European alternatives. It all feels futile, kind of like pissing in the ocean.
Because the end goal of any business is to produce and sell as many products as possible, as quickly to market as possible, for as high margins as possible, not focusing if the tools they use to accomplish that goal are European, American, Indian, etc. Usually the more resources you focus on straying from the beaten path to niche solutions or rolling out your own solution, the more resources you waste from the goal of shipping the end product.
Therefore the SW devs and bean counters are still gonna go for Office 365, Azure, Google Workspaces, etc, instead of some no-name European alternative.
When you buy a house do you care if it was built using Bosch, Makita or Milwaukee power tools? Likewise, your customers don't care what SW tools you used either, they care about price, performance, speed and value.
If your competitors can beat you to market by using US/Chinese tools while you focus on using exclusively EU tools, you'll be selected out by the free market, unless some laws and tariffs are enacted against non-EU SW which I don't see happening in Europe.
If you're in finance, public sector or energy production you're going to want to mitigate the risk of US services now that the US is an adversary. We have things like DORA and NIS2 with high demands on cybersecurity. It wouldn't be far fetched to imagine the EU making it illegal to use US tech companies similar to how we can't use Chinese or Russian tech companies.
I recently moved my software business mostly off US services. Diversifying away from the US is one of the most important things all of us outside the US can do for the free world right now.
I'm an EU citizen, I would like the EU to be a competitive place in terms of software, however at the moment I have to say that it's a hostile place for software development and software as a service.
They are making too many dumb and potentially dangerous laws, just look at the cookie consent laws that accomplish nothing but erased millions of euros.
They AI laws and aspirations make me not even consider making any software that runs AI in the EU. I don't want to harm people, but it's next to impossible to make the distilled LLM I'm using to not say occasionally dumb shit. Just because an AI is "dangerous" doesn't mean you cannot use it in a place where it poses no real risk.
Most software businesses operate internationally, so the EU regulation is something you'll have to deal with no matter where you host, assuming you sell into the EU. I don't believe that hosting in the EU means you need to treat non-EU jurisdictions with EU law.
Note too that places like OVH have data centres in multiple countries, just like AWS and Azure do. I can't comment on taxes for companies registered in the EU as I don't live there, but again, where you are headquartered as a business is up to you, and there are many choices.
In terms of being competitive, some European services like OVH, Gandi, and Mistral are absolutely competitive internationally. For AI, Mistral is up there with the best of them.
> I don't believe that hosting in the EU means you need to treat non-EU jurisdictions with EU law.
Let's say to that I want to develop something that uses an "evil" AI and I only want to sell to countries outside of the EU, I just can't do that because during development I would be suffocated by unhelpful regulations while someone in the US doing the same would be not.
> Most software businesses operate internationally, so the EU regulation is something you'll have to deal with no matter where you host, assuming you sell into the EU.
Having my whole business being at risk is not the same thing as only having a significant market being at risk.
> where you are headquartered as a business is up to you, and there are many choices.
Yes and the problem I was pointing out is that I would unlikely to pick an EU country because broken legislation that would hinder me is not something I want to deal with.
The EU problem is that legislation that is not around manufacturing is very knee-jerky, I don't feel like it would be a safe place for my potential software business, because legislation seems to be driven by headlines rather than rationality and the people making the legislations don't look too competent based on the end results.
> In terms of being competitive, some European services like OVH, Gandi, and Mistral are absolutely competitive internationally
Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean, ChatGPT, Meta, DeepSeek are a league of their own.
I'd say developing "evil" AI is a bad business idea. And if you really think that Mistral is not competitive then you clearly know so little about the AI landscape that it's hilarious that you think you're going to go develop some "evil" AI company.
> I'd say developing "evil" AI is a bad business idea.
You know that quotes have a meaning, a knife can kill people, but it can also be used to make tasty food, the EU wants to ban the knife because it can kill people in this case.
> And if you really think that Mistral is not competitive then you clearly know so little about the AI landscape that it's hilarious that you think you're going to go develop some "evil" AI company.
Making up childish nonsense does not advance your argument.
Small, so very easy for me to do and little impact, much harder obviously for large businesses.
Still, I would flag use of US services as a major risk for non-US businesses right now. Having previously run a >200 person software company, I probably wouldn't immediately move all services to non-US alternatives, but I sure would have a migration plan ready and alternative explored and selected in case shit hit the fan for US software.
Given the current state of things, I think it's entirely plausible that US services are either hit with things like tariffs, or end up suffering US state censorship at some point.
> end up suffering US state censorship at some point.
You had a higher risk for that with the democrats, remember the AI videos that upset Kamala and Gavin?
European countries have a far worse track record of censorship.
> Still, I would flag use of US services as a major risk for non-US businesses right now.
> Given the current state of things, I think it's entirely plausible that US services are either hit with things like tariffs, or end up suffering US state censorship at some point.
Who made your phone, your computer and the OS your computer is running?
Every EU company I ever worked for, from big multinationals to start-ups, mostly used US software and/or US/Chinese products anyway, even though engineers already knew there are FOSS/European alternatives. It all feels futile, kind of like pissing in the ocean.
Because the end goal of any business is to produce and sell as many products as possible, as quickly to market as possible, for as high margins as possible, not focusing if the tools they use to accomplish that goal are European, American, Indian, etc. Usually the more resources you focus on straying from the beaten path to niche solutions or rolling out your own solution, the more resources you waste from the goal of shipping the end product.
Therefore the SW devs and bean counters are still gonna go for Office 365, Azure, Google Workspaces, etc, instead of some no-name European alternative.
When you buy a house do you care if it was built using Bosch, Makita or Milwaukee power tools? Likewise, your customers don't care what SW tools you used either, they care about price, performance, speed and value.
If your competitors can beat you to market by using US/Chinese tools while you focus on using exclusively EU tools, you'll be selected out by the free market, unless some laws and tariffs are enacted against non-EU SW which I don't see happening in Europe.