I only knew there is a bad cookie banner when I've opened the website in another browser.
Have mercy, webmasters.
Suppose I am an indian developer interested to work with European Data sovereignity because imo I value privacy personally just as much as the EU population and it would be great to be more connected and wishing to connect with them more.
So I have thought of using EU options in my servers/services if I use them for the most part and I can even swap out to completely European if need be.
So let's say to be a part of this? should I be an European company? If so, I even looked at it on how to establish a company in Europe rather easily (preferably a lean company) and It seems that Estonia seems the best way for me to create an EU company from my country without too much hassle but the costs of operation does feel like a lot for just starting out let's say.
I am also not sure about the fact that given I live in India, Some data sharing arrangement can be generated or would I have to actually migrate to say EU (which although I love EU, I currently appreciate my country as well and migration is a hassle right now)
I wish if such a manifesto could work for India and EU and a deeper integration could be made between the two countries about such tech related software or other as I have been a vocal supporter of European tech providers like hetzner,ovh etc. and they are even cheaper than american hyperscalers in many/most cases.
I’m sure your desire to help is genuine. But Europe might need to find their own feet with an initiative like this before accepting help from foreigners.
Clients of mine are on hyperscalers due to the ease of deployment,etc but they are focused on lock-in, if ease could be attained in combination with portability then an ecosystem could exist where mid-scaler providers (that exists in abundance in Europe) could have a better chance against the behemoths.
Well, if Europe existed without them, then Europe likely wouldn't have ever home-grown all the advances from the more entrepreneurially-minded countries.
When I worked at AWS, there was GovCloud, and only American citizens residing in American soil and connecting from American soil were able to give support to these customers. So even if you were legally authorised to work in the US and resided in the US, you couldn't work with GovCloud customers.
Or if you are an American temporarily residing in Romania or Canada, then you also can't work with GovCloud customers.
I expect the same situation will happen to you. But I am just speculating.
A European sovereign cloud is desperately needed for highly sensitive government, military, and national security workloads, and these must be thoroughly vetted to ensure compliance.
But for anything else, like personal e-mail or e-commerce? I'm sure there will be a lot of flexibility for non-European contributions, but it will probably be like it currently is: open source projects spanning the globe.
My focus was on the more of a Eu-alternatives kind of thing. I want my idea of privacy to be aligned and EU seems perfect for that. I want to provide sustainability in an idea & can establish an EU company or partner up with one.
My question is that I would still live in India for the most part starting out & I might be unable to make an EU company in the start too but if I am required, then I will do so
Aside from this, I am willing to use only EU services internally for my product as well as I mentioned.
is there any way that I can still align myself with the EU-alternatives mission?
Might sound a bit strange but I want to come into Eu but I can't because immigration is hard/expenses and I want to come to Europe when I finally figure out things/have a decent product in the first place.
Some people told me to create an EU company which holds an Indian company as a consultancy firm and you can be part of both and manage to establish a Data sharing policy given that I can access EU data from Indian soil so If I can do something about it.
I am not really familiar with EU laws tho so I am interested to hear more from people actually interested.
America has had decades to privately run and develop their own software alternatives and everything (Windows, Office, Google) is extremely deeply established now and hard to compete against. I mean, can you imagine building a proprietary x86_64 operating system from scratch not based on Linux? And writing the code is just a small part of the work. You also need drivers from manufacturers like Realtek and Nvidia. You need people buying your product. You need marketing.
It's just not going to happen. Open source is the only way forward for EU, in my opinion.
And therefore, I think you will be able to contribute as much as you want to these open source efforts. Even testing and translations are already great initiatives, but if you can also write code, that's even better!
Usually I try to open source it & release it usually in permissive licenses (Full disclosure to experiment with ideas I use LLM's sometimes)
I don't really want Europe to replace America only now switching to India. Our ideals might match right now but y'know we live in a multi polarized world now and we just have to look for what's great for Europe from European perspective and so on & as an Indian, I appreciate it given that we have points of common interests regarding privacy.
So my point was that I already open source projects. But the reason I feel a lot of issues is that open source project -> actual deployment pipeline is still messy for the average person and this is the idea I was / still am targeting with firecracker vm's where someone can pay for an open source service to be deployed on vps for some time (Alright now a lot of options have come like sprites but i have been talking about from 2-3 months maybe 4 back when no implementation existed and even right now the one click button solution ui/ux I wanted to create still hasn't been created)
Like instead of being bound to your service with tos as a saas, I am hoping to treat each as a vps and the tos which would surround that which would be more permissive.
I was gonna build more on it but then ramflation happened so probably gonna have the idea internally till the bubble bursts or when its good enough (a big chunk of me not open sourcing it is that its really hacky and consists huge LLM help right now especially with gliderlabs/ssh library part & I don't want to create yet another AI slop)
I know hindi (the most widely spoken language in India) and I am down to provide some translations to Open source too
The issue with Open source without any offering is that (i have written about it) is that there is zero funding and incentive. Heck, I am the person who made a post about how to promote open source/fix this issue & After months of thinking, I kind of feel providing EU privacy friendly solution might be the best bet. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430) [Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that]
A lot of it felt like a chicken and egg problem to me. People want better UI/UX but developers build for dev first and there needs to be a real incentive in most cases to have great UI/UX which might include some financial benefits plus open source still has some large issues in funding which is why I thought of the cloud idea as well (I want to establish a railway like pricing model where you get charged for what you use but its still reasonable and there can be a deploy to cloud option and developers who create open source projects gets the funding in first place or have a more flexible way to earn from their project, similar to BYOK but way more user friendly)
Anyways my point is that I feel deeply aligned with EU right now. I just want to ask for some EU laws given I am still living in Indian state right now and just more information about it.
nkoren•1h ago
kevin061•1h ago
tucnak•58m ago
Unless you're a hyperscaler yourself, hyperscaling is overrated.