Edit: It is a joint open source initiative between Germany, France, Italy, & Netherlands to make Cybersecurity, AI, Cloud, & Social Media Network alternatives
Maybe we can finally get a Facebook open source alternative with mobile apps /s
Spotted this on Mastodon so I decided to inform you all. What you think?
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
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.
does anyone know what the difference between OsmAnd and Organic Maps is?
If the EU doesn’t also pursue Open Source Hardware (OSH), then vulnerabilities will still exist.
FOSS or FLOSS is good, but OSH should be with it side by side.
Isn’t the Fediverse already an open source social media platform?
It is, but developing is also supporting existing software, so supporting Mastodon, or other fediverse platforms would fit the bill.
Regarding the social network piece, I’d like to see a push in the worldwide OSS community to make an installer for self hosted federated services. I know it’s not realistic to make that completely push-button, but something that will take local machine config and connection information and then configure docker and the necessary containers for whatever services the person wants to host.
I’d start the project myself but my coding ability amounts to only a little more than hello world in a couple languages.
finally. i’ve been waiting for this for a long time. finally a worthwhile software development project again.
France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands will work to develop open, European alternatives in “key areas” such as AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and – curiously – social networks.
especially social networks are important, as it allows people to connect and exchange messages outside of the influence of US big biased algorithms.
does anybody have a link to the project website, where one can sign up and contribute?
