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Entrusting your business to an american entity is the stupidest idea you could have thought about. Especially us europeans should not rely on American services

Entrusting your business to an american entity is the stupidest idea you could have thought about. Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it. American corporations are just as much a liability as their counterparts in China.

traveler01 6y ago
I gotta agree with you. I understand GitHub doing that, they fear repercussions (remember that Huawei employee being arrested?). But, these things are too serious for a company to ignore. Chinese and USA services should be avoided...
- drstewart 6y ago
  I assume this will be your last post on HN then...
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it. Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success. We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives and if they would, the money would evaporate over night to companies with political connections and overpriced consultants who would just produce documentation. Let's face it, the ship of EU dominance in tech has sailed a long time ago, we might as well get comfy with the US pulling the strings on that front. The only way the EU would ever stand a chance is if the EU would pull a Chinese style great firewall and outright ban foreign tech companies on their internal market, leaving space for local companies to spring up and fill the void but that will never happen.
- icelancer 6y ago
  I generally agree with your post (we both made the mistake of posting during EU peak times and not US peak times, so downvotes incoming), but it's worth noting that Airbus is a success story bolstered by the now-EU to combat American aerospace dominance.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    I love Airbus, but they're not a software company and since we live in the age of cloud-everything, software has eaten the world and all our mobile tech is controlled by two US walled gardens (apple and google) that is a lot more potentially impactful on our daily lives on multiple levels of our society than what Airbus could do.
- f6v 6y ago
  The Silicon Valley wasn’t built overnight. The software industry is just taking off in the EU. Mind you, nobody would have thought that the US would loose their leading role in the Middle East, look at them now. I can see the same happening in tech.
  - waihtis 6y ago
    Problem is that EU is not comparable in any manner to the US. For one, where do you suggest the Silicon Valley of EU is? London would've been a decent bet except that they just bailed. As someone else mentioned, capital is way harder to raise (meaning slower to market) - and then an underrated factor which is equally important is how easy or difficult is it to sell as a nascent startup. At least in my industry (cybersecurity) it has been very hard in the EU vs US in the earlier stages of product maturity. Much like the parent comment, I don't see this changing anytime soon and I'm fully betting on the fact US will keep their dominance in tech.
    - f6v 6y ago
      Well, we shouldn’t just assume that Silicon Valley has to be a place. The lockdown showed that numerous companies can operate 100% remotely. And I got the impression that there’s always more money than startups.
      - waihtis 6y ago
        Silicon Valley absolutely has to be a place and people will return to face-to-face social contact the minute that is possible. It is impossible to build long-term meaningful relationships on a 100% remote basis.
    - icelancer 6y ago
      Wages are also strangely way, way worse in the EU. When you combine that with cost of living (and taxes) being far higher there, it's not a great recipe for growth.
- sjogress 6y ago
  I agree with you that Office 365, AWS and Github are great products. Hard, if not impossible, to catch up as a competitior, especially when you have trillion dollar companies backing them. However, if you cannot trust those products then you cannot use them. Remember, this thread is about Github blocking an entire company due to one employee due to American politics. If a non-US company risks to lose it project management/code management (Github), its infrastructure (AWS) or its documents (Office 365) on a whim due to American policies then they cannot use those products. If a big enough chunk of the world can't use the American offerings, then there is a market for alternatives.
- fnord123 6y ago
  I think it's important to frame it correctly: US companies have been persistently acting illegally in Europe. Avoiding taxes (e.g. Amazon's Project Goldcrest) to undercut competitors, mishandling data for profit, and then abusing market dominant positions to prevent European competitors from rising up; forcing those potential competitors to sell to US firms. You're right that it's probably too late to reverse all of this economic damage that the US has intentionally caused. It's a difficult problem for the world.
  - drstewart 6y ago
    Ah yes, poor innocent Europe that is so distraught over the economic damage US companies did that checks notes Ireland sued the EU on behalf of Apple to prevent it from having to pay taxes. You're right. You should frame it correctly and take ownership over the complete and utter regulatory failures of European countries to support and nurture local businesses.
- m000 6y ago
  > Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success. There are no such plans. EU wields a lot of regulatory power. The most likely path of action would be to force MS/Amazon/etc. to spin-off their EU side of the business. And I believe that the companies have already prepared for this.
- pastrami_panda 6y ago
  > We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives Did you miss this a couple of weeks back? https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develop-next-gen-processors-and-2nm-technology/ https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    That's for semiconductor technology, not a full software stack, search engine, social network, or server hosting farm that could compete with Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Designing ICs is already a niche market, and designing process nodes for IC manufacturing is even more niche. Furthermore, the EU already had technical superiority here: ASML is the company that supplies TSMC with the machinery that powers their 5nm node.
    - pastrami_panda 6y ago
      Sure, I get what you're saying, but I hope you see my point here. Pursuing 2nm lithography (which is something like 1-2 nodes from bleeding edge?) with 135 billion euro surely tells you something about their commitment. I would also point out that many of these companies you mention are immensely scattered. Take anyone and you'll find their resources spread across an evergrowing domain/portfolio. I'm not saying it's bad that Apple is developing cars and Facebook VR headsets - I'm just saying it spreads them thinner. If the EU found it valuable enough to pursue e.g search within the next five years it's not at all unfeasible or unreasonable to do so. It might even be better for the greater good of the internet frankly.
- kavalg 6y ago
  It depends. For example, office software is already far into the flat region of its innovation curve. IMHO it would suffice to throw away MS and adopt e.g. LibreOffice in all educational and government institutions throughout EU (and there are precedents already). GitHub shall be even easier to replace (complexity is far below office and open source alternatives do exist). Now with AWS, it is really a tough question. Hetzner is doing a very good (albeit slow) progress towards AWS functionality. Their prices are competitive and customer service is much better that what I ever got from AWS (not affiliated, just a happy customer). The level of integration in AWS however is still out of the reach of Hetzner (Cloudfront, S3, SES etc). It would be really interesting to know your opinion on what functionality in AWS is indispensable and what you can sacrifice in case Hetzner/OVH price for the rest is the same as AWS or lower.
BatteryMountain 6y ago
I'm in Africa and most companies here host their systems either locally (very expensive and slow) or in America. The other day at work I had a pretty heated argument at work with a colleague when I mentioned it is really not good for us to host any of our stuff in America (all of it is currently in America). He basically freaked out about it. I just wanted to hear his thoughts about it, but he took personal offence (he's an aws fanboy). There are problems with the laws, copyright laws too, US gov agencies etc that are all incompatible with our own laws. If something bad were to happen, our own courts have zero power to help us. We also don't have a direct fiber line to America so all our traffic hops through Europe and more recently through South America, so about 200ms added to most requests. The only reasons to use American hosting companies is because of: 1) The financial cost can in some cases work out to be lower than local options. 2) It can be easier to scale your service vs self-hosting on premisses. 3) American hosting platforms have really nice GUI's and tooling, while being well integrated with the billing side - everything mostly just works as expected. But other than that, if money and skills are not a problem, then on-prem is best here.
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  Money and skills are ALWAYS problems. Those are "cheap" and "fast" of the "cheap, fast, good, pick two".
  - cambalache 6y ago
    > Money and skills are ALWAYS problems. Those are "cheap" and "fast" of the "cheap, fast, good, pick two". Those are not problems, those are trade-offs. OP is right, you could be in a position in which those trade-offs dont apply to you (i.e. by buying a "expensive" but great solution, this happens all the time in all the industries) or you could sacrifice one item (say speed) in your solution if this is not a problem for your workflow ("so what if a open source tool runs 2x as slow as the best proprietary option, our daily batch processing take 2 hours and it is used in weekly buckets")
    - jfrunyon 6y ago
jokethrowaway 6y ago
This is ridiculous. China requires access to your company code and pretty much owns you. The USA government is interfering as much as Europeans government do, by making stupid laws and demanding access when they can think of an excuse. Sure, it's bad but it's not as bad as China. You can't trust any government, but some are better than others.
- swayson 6y ago
  Indeed, gives me hope for decentralised technologies like gitcoin, that could perhaps give more agency to developers.
- namelosw 6y ago
  You must be kidding. There’s no way companies like Apple would ever handout iCloud source code to China.
icelancer 6y ago
The top 33 "software and programming" companies by revenue in the world can be found below [0]. 28 of them are American. Two are in the EU. One is in the UK. One is in Australia. The last is Russian. One of the companies in the EU produces enterprise software almost no one on this website uses (SAP). The other is Dassault. In the US the top five companies are Microsoft, Oracle, ADP, Adobe, and Salesforce. If you include Alphabet and Amazon, well... When the EU or Asia (non-China, I guess) can offer mature alternatives even remotely competitive with the American companies, I guess your strategy could work. Until then, no one is going to flock to Hetzner over AWS. And I like Hetzner. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  > One of the companies in the EU produces enterprise software almost no one on this website uses (SAP) What? SAP is a huge software that is used in a lot of companies.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    Correct. I'm also willing to bet the people on Hacker News are not typically in the circle of businesses that use SAP.
    - Closi 6y ago
      I'm willing to bet that they are. Do you think there is a huge tendency towards Oracle, Infor or MS Dynamics rather than SAP across hacker news, or are you just assuming that people who go on hacker news aren't in the 'circle of companies' which need an ERP? Most people on HN probably go work for companies that pay them the best compensation or offer them a good position, not based on what ERP they chose.
    - dtech 6y ago
      You underestimate the reach of SAP and overestimate the "SV-ness" of HN.
    - 6y ago
MaxHoppersGhost 6y ago
- Sent from my iPhone Ok buddy. Good luck with China and not using American software.
bitzl 6y ago
What do you suggest to use instead of GitHub?

traveler01 6y ago

I gotta agree with you. I understand GitHub doing that, they fear repercussions (remember that Huawei employee being arrested?). But, these things are too serious for a company to ignore. Chinese and USA services should be avoided...

drstewart 6y ago
I assume this will be your last post on HN then...

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

>Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it. Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success. We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives and if they would, the money would evaporate over night to companies with political connections and overpriced consultants who would just produce documentation. Let's face it, the ship of EU dominance in tech has sailed a long time ago, we might as well get comfy with the US pulling the strings on that front. The only way the EU would ever stand a chance is if the EU would pull a Chinese style great firewall and outright ban foreign tech companies on their internal market, leaving space for local companies to spring up and fill the void but that will never happen.

icelancer 6y ago
I generally agree with your post (we both made the mistake of posting during EU peak times and not US peak times, so downvotes incoming), but it's worth noting that Airbus is a success story bolstered by the now-EU to combat American aerospace dominance.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  I love Airbus, but they're not a software company and since we live in the age of cloud-everything, software has eaten the world and all our mobile tech is controlled by two US walled gardens (apple and google) that is a lot more potentially impactful on our daily lives on multiple levels of our society than what Airbus could do.
f6v 6y ago
The Silicon Valley wasn’t built overnight. The software industry is just taking off in the EU. Mind you, nobody would have thought that the US would loose their leading role in the Middle East, look at them now. I can see the same happening in tech.
- waihtis 6y ago
  Problem is that EU is not comparable in any manner to the US. For one, where do you suggest the Silicon Valley of EU is? London would've been a decent bet except that they just bailed. As someone else mentioned, capital is way harder to raise (meaning slower to market) - and then an underrated factor which is equally important is how easy or difficult is it to sell as a nascent startup. At least in my industry (cybersecurity) it has been very hard in the EU vs US in the earlier stages of product maturity. Much like the parent comment, I don't see this changing anytime soon and I'm fully betting on the fact US will keep their dominance in tech.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Well, we shouldn’t just assume that Silicon Valley has to be a place. The lockdown showed that numerous companies can operate 100% remotely. And I got the impression that there’s always more money than startups.
    - waihtis 6y ago
      Silicon Valley absolutely has to be a place and people will return to face-to-face social contact the minute that is possible. It is impossible to build long-term meaningful relationships on a 100% remote basis.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    Wages are also strangely way, way worse in the EU. When you combine that with cost of living (and taxes) being far higher there, it's not a great recipe for growth.
sjogress 6y ago
I agree with you that Office 365, AWS and Github are great products. Hard, if not impossible, to catch up as a competitior, especially when you have trillion dollar companies backing them. However, if you cannot trust those products then you cannot use them. Remember, this thread is about Github blocking an entire company due to one employee due to American politics. If a non-US company risks to lose it project management/code management (Github), its infrastructure (AWS) or its documents (Office 365) on a whim due to American policies then they cannot use those products. If a big enough chunk of the world can't use the American offerings, then there is a market for alternatives.
fnord123 6y ago
I think it's important to frame it correctly: US companies have been persistently acting illegally in Europe. Avoiding taxes (e.g. Amazon's Project Goldcrest) to undercut competitors, mishandling data for profit, and then abusing market dominant positions to prevent European competitors from rising up; forcing those potential competitors to sell to US firms. You're right that it's probably too late to reverse all of this economic damage that the US has intentionally caused. It's a difficult problem for the world.
- drstewart 6y ago
  Ah yes, poor innocent Europe that is so distraught over the economic damage US companies did that checks notes Ireland sued the EU on behalf of Apple to prevent it from having to pay taxes. You're right. You should frame it correctly and take ownership over the complete and utter regulatory failures of European countries to support and nurture local businesses.
m000 6y ago
> Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success. There are no such plans. EU wields a lot of regulatory power. The most likely path of action would be to force MS/Amazon/etc. to spin-off their EU side of the business. And I believe that the companies have already prepared for this.
pastrami_panda 6y ago
> We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives Did you miss this a couple of weeks back? https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develop-next-gen-processors-and-2nm-technology/ https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  That's for semiconductor technology, not a full software stack, search engine, social network, or server hosting farm that could compete with Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Designing ICs is already a niche market, and designing process nodes for IC manufacturing is even more niche. Furthermore, the EU already had technical superiority here: ASML is the company that supplies TSMC with the machinery that powers their 5nm node.
  - pastrami_panda 6y ago
    Sure, I get what you're saying, but I hope you see my point here. Pursuing 2nm lithography (which is something like 1-2 nodes from bleeding edge?) with 135 billion euro surely tells you something about their commitment. I would also point out that many of these companies you mention are immensely scattered. Take anyone and you'll find their resources spread across an evergrowing domain/portfolio. I'm not saying it's bad that Apple is developing cars and Facebook VR headsets - I'm just saying it spreads them thinner. If the EU found it valuable enough to pursue e.g search within the next five years it's not at all unfeasible or unreasonable to do so. It might even be better for the greater good of the internet frankly.
kavalg 6y ago
It depends. For example, office software is already far into the flat region of its innovation curve. IMHO it would suffice to throw away MS and adopt e.g. LibreOffice in all educational and government institutions throughout EU (and there are precedents already). GitHub shall be even easier to replace (complexity is far below office and open source alternatives do exist). Now with AWS, it is really a tough question. Hetzner is doing a very good (albeit slow) progress towards AWS functionality. Their prices are competitive and customer service is much better that what I ever got from AWS (not affiliated, just a happy customer). The level of integration in AWS however is still out of the reach of Hetzner (Cloudfront, S3, SES etc). It would be really interesting to know your opinion on what functionality in AWS is indispensable and what you can sacrifice in case Hetzner/OVH price for the rest is the same as AWS or lower.

BatteryMountain 6y ago

I'm in Africa and most companies here host their systems either locally (very expensive and slow) or in America. The other day at work I had a pretty heated argument at work with a colleague when I mentioned it is really not good for us to host any of our stuff in America (all of it is currently in America). He basically freaked out about it. I just wanted to hear his thoughts about it, but he took personal offence (he's an aws fanboy). There are problems with the laws, copyright laws too, US gov agencies etc that are all incompatible with our own laws. If something bad were to happen, our own courts have zero power to help us. We also don't have a direct fiber line to America so all our traffic hops through Europe and more recently through South America, so about 200ms added to most requests. The only reasons to use American hosting companies is because of: 1) The financial cost can in some cases work out to be lower than local options. 2) It can be easier to scale your service vs self-hosting on premisses. 3) American hosting platforms have really nice GUI's and tooling, while being well integrated with the billing side - everything mostly just works as expected. But other than that, if money and skills are not a problem, then on-prem is best here.

jfrunyon 6y ago
Money and skills are ALWAYS problems. Those are "cheap" and "fast" of the "cheap, fast, good, pick two".
- cambalache 6y ago
  > Money and skills are ALWAYS problems. Those are "cheap" and "fast" of the "cheap, fast, good, pick two". Those are not problems, those are trade-offs. OP is right, you could be in a position in which those trade-offs dont apply to you (i.e. by buying a "expensive" but great solution, this happens all the time in all the industries) or you could sacrifice one item (say speed) in your solution if this is not a problem for your workflow ("so what if a open source tool runs 2x as slow as the best proprietary option, our daily batch processing take 2 hours and it is used in weekly buckets")
  - jfrunyon 6y ago

jokethrowaway 6y ago

This is ridiculous. China requires access to your company code and pretty much owns you. The USA government is interfering as much as Europeans government do, by making stupid laws and demanding access when they can think of an excuse. Sure, it's bad but it's not as bad as China. You can't trust any government, but some are better than others.

swayson 6y ago
Indeed, gives me hope for decentralised technologies like gitcoin, that could perhaps give more agency to developers.
namelosw 6y ago
You must be kidding. There’s no way companies like Apple would ever handout iCloud source code to China.

icelancer 6y ago

The top 33 "software and programming" companies by revenue in the world can be found below [0]. 28 of them are American. Two are in the EU. One is in the UK. One is in Australia. The last is Russian. One of the companies in the EU produces enterprise software almost no one on this website uses (SAP). The other is Dassault. In the US the top five companies are Microsoft, Oracle, ADP, Adobe, and Salesforce. If you include Alphabet and Amazon, well... When the EU or Asia (non-China, I guess) can offer mature alternatives even remotely competitive with the American companies, I guess your strategy could work. Until then, no one is going to flock to Hetzner over AWS. And I like Hetzner. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> One of the companies in the EU produces enterprise software almost no one on this website uses (SAP) What? SAP is a huge software that is used in a lot of companies.
- icelancer 6y ago
  Correct. I'm also willing to bet the people on Hacker News are not typically in the circle of businesses that use SAP.
  - Closi 6y ago
    I'm willing to bet that they are. Do you think there is a huge tendency towards Oracle, Infor or MS Dynamics rather than SAP across hacker news, or are you just assuming that people who go on hacker news aren't in the 'circle of companies' which need an ERP? Most people on HN probably go work for companies that pay them the best compensation or offer them a good position, not based on what ERP they chose.
  - dtech 6y ago
    You underestimate the reach of SAP and overestimate the "SV-ness" of HN.
  - 6y ago

MaxHoppersGhost 6y ago

- Sent from my iPhone Ok buddy. Good luck with China and not using American software.

bitzl 6y ago

What do you suggest to use instead of GitHub?