| HN Mirror

Open Source is a small issue thing in the context of an entire economy.

It's nice to have some support for it, but it doesn't even lend well to that: it's very hard to know which projects to support until after the fact, of course we know that 99% of it is never even used. The kinds of people involved don't do it generally for money, and also have their own ambitions. What happens when you have a 'great piece of open source' that AirBus and Daimler really want to integrate, but the 'maintainer' just doesn't care to make the necessary changes? Or is against it? Or is only working 'now and then ? Or doesn't feel 'large corps should benefit' or whatever? It's a tricky space. Worth supporting, but it would take a very specialized team and frankly, not that much money.

Europe needs large industrial organizations because they are the lifeblood of the economy, in fact, the hallmark of advanced civilizations. You want to know the 'difference' between 'rich' and 'poor' Europe? In 'rich Europe' a far grater portion of the population works in corporations with >1K employees.

Only at a certain scale can a lot of activities be addressed: you can't make an airliner with all it's supply chain, IP, R&D, systems integration, training, support and the myriad of operational activities with 'open source' or even with 'small shops' or 'vc money'. A lot of know-how is embedded within these groups that given them competitive advantage, and of course, scale is necessary to be competitive at an international level especially in 'winner takes all' type markets.

EU investment in open source is nice, but it's a side-show. What EU needs is Googles & Salesforces etc..