this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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EU OpenSource alternatives already exist since a lot of years, often even superior as the ones from the US. It's not the lack of EU alternatives, it's only the lack of their use by corporations and goverments, eg. Blink and WebKit are forks from the German KHTML (killed by Apple) by KDE, In the AI, there exist, among others, the Swiss Apertus (FLOSS) by the Swiss Supercomputer Center (CSCS) used also by the CERN. Proton, Nextcloud, Murena, Mastodon, Fairphone......It would be easy for the EU to have total sovereignty in Soft and Services, it just lacks the political will to have it, while Trump is occupied with his Ballroom scam, paid by Google, M$, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Cryptocompanies & cia.
https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to
https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
https://eu-os.eu/
On the other hand, it isn't so important the country of community driven OpenSource, more important in those made by the mencioned Ballroom spomsores which are to avoid, also in commercial proprietary apps, there are also preferable those from EU companies.
Something that should not be forgotten is that hardware matters to. If Nvidia, Intel or AMD has an interdiction to sell to a country, you can have all the FLOSS software (Fair, Libre and Open), if you have no hardware then tough shit. China is getting good GPU with a shiton of investments, so Europe needs to do the same. Using RiscV for this would allow to have an instruction set that already have nice support (I even heard it can be used for GPU) to bring nice or newer stuff to the table. For manufacturing, a Netherland company is producing the tools of TSMC so there is that, at least.
Edit: added links
The EU is also going away from trades with the US (not only because tariffs) and prefering to trade with China as a more trustworth client and provider.
Imagine how fast the US turned to shit, that China is now more trustworthy. Or at least, much more stable.
In trading stability is that what count. Apart that China offers way more in tecnology than the US, whose tecnology is only centred in weapons. Look at Chinas EVs, they are light years more advanced as Tesla, same in robotics, already massive implemented in the society (surveillance apart)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Ji_p0ODKk
In my opinion, only turning to China is not enough. Diversifying is good, but in the same time, nothing "under control" is built, your stability depends on diplomacy and in this case, and it is a big weakness (this is how Xi made Trump bending with rare earth)
It is always best not to depend on third countries in the essentials. This thing about rare earths is basically not so correct, since they are not really rare, they are found in practically all countries, only the extraction is enormously polluting, but on the other hand there are in each country old exploitations and mining in an environment that has already been destroyed. Urban mining may also should be more used than currently, with the huge amount of electronic waste available everywhere and are a big source for not only "rare earth", but also a lot of other raw material. As always, political, economic and corporation interests prevail the common sense.
TOPXI