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
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.
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.
does anyone know what the difference between OsmAnd and Organic Maps is?
Sure Blink is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML. But that was 1000 years ago. The biggest contributors by leagues are Google and Apple. Those are US projects. Trying to say they are European is nuts.
LibreOffice is German though and while OpenOffice was from Oracle, it was based on StarOffice which was German. So, the EU can claim that one.
NextCloud is a solid example too.
And, of course, there is SUSE.
Igalia (Spain) brings Servo (web browser) and Chimera Linux too.
Not 1000 years ago, KHTML is still used by Konqueror, last release 25.08.2 2025-10-09 (Linux only). But yes, it got very marginal, some more development by KDE would be desirable to be an real alternative.
https://apps.kde.org/konqueror/
Certainly Spain is pretty active in software developement (OpenSource and also proprietary), eg. Panda Security with the first cloud based AV which retrieved Malware definition in realtime from the cloud. Nowadays most other AV, even the Windows Defender, use this system.
https://www.f6s.com/companies/software/spain/co
My point is that Apple dominates that list of developers (and them and Google before that). How much do you think BlackBerry is contributing these days?
Since we are talking history though, one of the original KHTML devs was Andreas Kling who went on to work on WebKit at Apple and who now leads the Ladybird browser project. He lives in Sweden so I guess Ladybird is European though the newly formed Ladybird Foundation is US based (I am sure to make it easier to raise money by offering US tax deductions).
We’ll see, at the moment in the US isn’t a good country for devs or cientifics, less for foreigners. They even cut the money to the NASA, shutting down climate sats, investigation centers and universities, not even police and military get paid (only ICE). Better if he tried it in Canada, the US is currently the worst and most crappy country to immigrate for everyone.
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
TOPXI