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Europe’s dependence on US tech is a critical weakness (www.ft.com)

submitted 3 days ago by CAVOK to c/[email protected]

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In order to protect their sovereignty, the continent’s leaders must invest in a digital ecosystem independent of America

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The problem for large institutions is that they very often have specialized software relying on some American software or being American themself. More often then not that means converting large amounts of data from a propietary format into something useable by another software. The company selling the original software obviously does not want that to happen at all. Also both programs work in different ways, so data might have to be split in non obvious ways.

Then you need to retrain the workforce to use the new software, which probably does not work properly to begin with.

There are also often dependencies. Like Microsoft Office Add-Ins from third party vendors. They will not like going to Libre Office and it is likely not easy either.

Not saying it is impossible, but a transition takes years and is going to lead to some serious problems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

This legacy type software doesn't stop working over night, and while the move to cloud services is more worrying in that regard, this problem is mostly a legal one and the EU could easily change its laws if it would see a need. In fact recent EU legislation explicitly allows suspending patent and copyright protections if foreign software vendors are trying to weaponize this.