Europe’s dependence on US tech is a critical weakness
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The failure of bureocracies to move to Linux is and was organisational and political, not technical.
True, but that doesn't make it any easier. People are very, very stubborn and dumb about this and at least here in Germany most people (including politicians) don't even see the issue with being entirely dependent on US tech corporations.
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The problem for large institutions is that they very often have specialized software relying on some American software or being American themself. More often then not that means converting large amounts of data from a propietary format into something useable by another software. The company selling the original software obviously does not want that to happen at all. Also both programs work in different ways, so data might have to be split in non obvious ways.
Then you need to retrain the workforce to use the new software, which probably does not work properly to begin with.
There are also often dependencies. Like Microsoft Office Add-Ins from third party vendors. They will not like going to Libre Office and it is likely not easy either.
Not saying it is impossible, but a transition takes years and is going to lead to some serious problems.
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This legacy type software doesn't stop working over night, and while the move to cloud services is more worrying in that regard, this problem is mostly a legal one and the EU could easily change its laws if it would see a need. In fact recent EU legislation explicitly allows suspending patent and copyright protections if foreign software vendors are trying to weaponize this.
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Go for all Linux, all open source
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The MS lobby is too strong. Many years and many countries tried to get away to linux and many ended up going back because of lobbying or just because it's simpler to pay millions to a single place.
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Better that than proprietary US software I guess
But yes, EU digital infrastructure should run on FOSS software as much as possible -
Canada has the same issue. The government of Canada is heavily invested in American-based cloud services. It's a strategic threat.
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That's just article about software. Software is easy replaceable and relativly low cost compared to hardware. And who needs software if you don't have hardware to run it.
Europe is lacking semiconductor companies after almost all died. The last one are NXP and Infineon but can't compare them to TSMC Intel or Samsung. ARM is just a documentation and licensing company. TSMC foundry in Dresden is planned for 2027 and it's at most 22nm process. If China starts with Taiwan only country capable to go lower than 5nm is USA and maybe Samsung in Korea right now.
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There's STMicroelectronics too.
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It wasnt really an issue until now
. Who would have though a founding member of NATO would go to the other side!But Europe weaned themselves off Russian gas, they can rebuild their own domestic defence industry.
