OpenForum Europe, held at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre this week, dared to ask a question that has been absent in the face of increasingly desperate pleas to reduce dependency on information and communications technology (ICT) that is based outside the European Union: can small countries do this without getting steamrolled by the bloc’s giants?
It’s a good question.
Following the European Commission’s open source strategy, which aims to promote free and open source software use by EU governments and public bodies, as well as businesses, the conference sought to unpick what smaller countries need to do in order to build their own technologies and platforms, rather than simply copy strategies designed in bigger markets.
Clara Thébert, policy advisor at organisers OpenForum Europe, said that Europe’s open source strategy “needs to deliver for smaller countries as well as its largest economies”.
“Countries such as Ireland should have a meaningful role in shaping Europe’s technology agenda and a clear opportunity to benefit from it. Ireland’s presidency [of the EU] gives us a chance to bring those perspectives directly into the European policy discussion. Today is about understanding what smaller countries need to build their own capabilities, remain competitive and contribute to Europe’s digital future,” she said in a statement.
The goal is worthy. Indeed, nothing about this is wrong, and small EU nations do need to worry about getting flattened by, for example, France or Germany, with their giant economies and, at least in the former case, desire to assert itself on the global stage.
But what is more interesting to me is that it is happening at all.
It is genuinely mystifying to me how Europe, home to major minicomputer manufacturers in the 1970s, not to mention a major player in what we used to call microcomputers, in both hardware and software, in the 1980s and early 1990s, can find itself at a point where it is so thoroughly dependent on not only foreign-manufactured technology, but foreign-coded, hosted and regulated software.
Well, it’s not mystifying at all, actually. That was just rhetoric. What it is is depressing.
The path of least resistance is one thing, but the scale of Europe’s computing and IT SNAFU is astonishing. Having initially been a collection of national markets, Europe transformed itself into an alternative pole for technological development and then, around about the era of Windows 95, just stopped bothering.
Was just giving up and letting Microsoft and the rest dominate the entire industry, and, indeed, dominate the technology used in every industry, really that much easier?
The graveyard of European tech – Olivetti, Acorn, Nixdorf, Bull, Psion, countless software companies – tells the tale of how we let our ambition collapse, and survivors like Nokia and Ericsson made it by pulling in their horns rather too far.
Some European technology success stories today, such as ARM, which was spun out of Acorn, and ASML, which grew out of a Philips joint venture, are global players – but European successes are thinner where the rubber hits the road, which is to say software and the platform layer. (Precisely how European ARM is these days, given it is largely owned by Japan’s SoftBank, we will skip over for the moment. At the very least it remains fundamentally based in Britain, which itself remains in Europe, despite the screaming.)
Operators
By utter coincidence, yesterday evening I found myself watching a documentary about KDE, the European-based desktop environment usually associated with the Linux operating system. Based on a Norwegian-developed library Qt, at the time a controversial choice and fascinating story, KDE proves that European projects can compete globally. It also tells us that small, at least in terms of population, countries can have, and have had, an outsized impact.
From time to time, European software has done this elsewhere, both in its free and open source guise as well as in cases of proprietary applications. Consider SuSE Linux, for instance, or ArchiCAD. Or even SAP, which may be unloved but is hardly unimportant.
Free and open source software can help. Clearly so in today’s era of artificial intelligence (AI) crushing Internet search, software increasingly delivered online and in a contingent manner, and an increasingly obviously dead Internet (at least at the level of the Web), where it allows for some remedial action at the very least. It allows us to build our own alternatives, and even to cast our bits upon the water to see if anyone else is interested. And, frankly, any amelioration of the situation will be welcome – and is long overdue.
Nevertheless, if I wanted to get to a world where Europe was able to stand its ground against the US, China or whoever tomorrow’s champion turns out to be, or even a world in which people were at the centre of how, why and what we design technology to do, well, I wouldn’t have started from here.
Ltd
