I’m curious what your stance on using products and services from non-European foundations is.
The discussion on LibreOffice made me think about your acceptance of open source products or free services from no-European, or even US American, foundations (The Open Document Foundartion is registerd germany, though).
Mozilla data privacy controversy aside my thought would for example apply to
- Apache Software Foundation (OpenOffice)
- Mozilla Foundation (Firefox, Thunderbird, …)
- Signal foundation (Signal)
to name the biggest.
For me the use of non-commercial or even open-source products and services from different non-European countries is okay, as they are funded by donations.
The whole idea of buyFromEU seems to funnel money into the own economy in order to have a strong market, and also to proudly use European products. The above mentioned foundations help to increase data sovereignty and after all break loose from commercial solutions that aim at deep integrations and walled gardens.
I think so, too. We’ve seen the big tech companies jump forward to lick the new US government’s boots. While the nonprofits haven’t done the same. So it seems to me they’re still with the people. This also doesn’t come as a surprise to me, since they want to do good, or at least something else than make record profit by ripping off people. I’m still using their Free Software. But I will cut down on relying on services hosted in the USA. I mean even if they’re a benevolent foundation, they might still be forced to cooperate with law enforcement and I don’t want to see my private data end up in Elon Musk’s AI or something like that. So I’m either hosting services myself or going to choose a provider and datacenter within the EU. (And I’m not using that many cloud services in the first place.)