The ingredients they don't want to list
I have a question for you: what do Linux, Python, MySQL, Nginx, and Kubernetes have in common?
They’re all technologies running inside Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. They’re all open source and free; and none of them were invented by these companies currently making billions from them.
That’s a side of the “US tech dominance” story that doesn’t get much airtime.
These “hyperscalers” didn’t create a good part of the software powering their platforms; they packaged it, scaled it, and spent a fortune marketing it.
But the foundations, those were built by open-source developers, many of them European. Linux is from Finland, Python from the Netherlands, and MySQL from Sweden.
The reason I bring this up is that the whole European digital sovereignty debate keeps sticking on this false premise: that we would have to somehow start from zero, that the Americans have secret know-how that we don’t, that building European alternatives would take decades…
That’s patently untrue. The foundations are already open and, in many cases, they were made here.
The new EU Cyber Resilience Act requires vendors to provide a software “bill of materials” for their products (a fancy way to say “ingredient list”).
This has produced quite a reaction from big tech: Lobbying, pushback, “grave concerns”, etc. You might wonder why, what’s essentially an ingredients list, would cause so much negativity. Maybe it’s because many of those ingredients are things they didn’t build themselves?
So, this whole “no alternatives” argument should really be setting off our scepticism alarms. When someone says a European equivalent to some US big tech offering is impossible we should be asking “is that true or did no-one even look?”. Because, the core tech is certainly available and open, possibly already running here or, in many cases, could be with a little effort.
Granted, some very specific setups will be harder and even impossible. But, for most usage, local can be done and probably even exists already.
The next time you’re picking a tool, take a closer look at the European offerings, you’ll often find they come from the same place the American ones do.
Colin