6 ms·

I really like this idea but I have a few questions. Suppose I am an indian developer interested to work with European Data sovereignity because imo I value pri

I really like this idea but I have a few questions. Suppose I am an indian developer interested to work with European Data sovereignity because imo I value privacy personally just as much as the EU population and it would be great to be more connected and wishing to connect with them more. So I have thought of using EU options in my servers/services if I use them for the most part and I can even swap out to completely European if need be. So let's say to be a part of this? should I be an European company? If so, I even looked at it on how to establish a company in Europe rather easily (preferably a lean company) and It seems that Estonia seems the best way for me to create an EU company from my country without too much hassle but the costs of operation does feel like a lot for just starting out let's say. I am also not sure about the fact that given I live in India, Some data sharing arrangement can be generated or would I have to actually migrate to say EU (which although I love EU, I currently appreciate my country as well and migration is a hassle right now) I wish if such a manifesto could work for India and EU and a deeper integration could be made between the two countries about such tech related software or other as I have been a vocal supporter of European tech providers like hetzner,ovh etc. and they are even cheaper than american hyperscalers in many/most cases.

josephg 9mo ago
At its heart, this is about Europe for Europe. People from other countries “contributing” technology solutions to European businesses and government is what got Europe into the strange mess they’re in now. And there’s been a long line of foreign - American - businesses which have promised that European data will always stay on European soil. And it’s quite clear that promise was not always kept. I’m sure your desire to help is genuine. But Europe might need to find their own feet with an initiative like this before accepting help from foreigners.
- whizzter 9mo ago
  I'd look at it in another way, hyperscalers exist due to code contributed from all around the world, often in the form of open source, Europe going closed and competing against the rest of the world (literally) isn't going to be a path forward. Clients of mine are on hyperscalers due to the ease of deployment,etc but they are focused on lock-in, if ease could be attained in combination with portability then an ecosystem could exist where mid-scaler providers (that exists in abundance in Europe) could have a better chance against the behemoths.
  - boilerupnc 9mo ago
    I believe this is one of the drivers for IBM Sovereign Core Announcement recently [0]. “ Technically, IBM Sovereign Core builds on open-source technology from the Red Hat ecosystem. The software uses OpenShift, among other things, and is designed to run on existing infrastructure. Organizations can deploy the platform in on-premises data centers, regional cloud environments, or through local service providers.” * Disclaimer: I’m an IBMer [0]. https://www.techzine.eu/news/privacy-compliance/137981/ibm-launches-sovereign-core-as-the-foundation-for-sovereign-cloud-and-ai/ https://www.techzine.eu/news/privacy-compliance/137981/ibm-l...
  - josephg 9mo ago
    > Europe going closed and competing against the rest of the world (literally) isn't going to be a path forward. Yes, I think this might be the actual way to help. Write opensource software that can be used by everyone. Including commercial products in the EU. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have a moat because of how difficult it is to build viable competitors to their products. I'd love to see more opensource libraries and applications chip away at this. How hard would it be to build a self hosted google docs competitor?
- philipallstar 9mo ago
  > People from other countries “contributing” technology solutions to European businesses and government is what got Europe into the strange mess they’re in now. Well, if Europe existed without them, then Europe likely wouldn't have ever home-grown all the advances from the more entrepreneurially-minded countries.
kevin061 9mo ago
I think you will probably find great difficulty. When I worked at AWS, there was GovCloud, and only American citizens residing in American soil and connecting from American soil were able to give support to these customers. So even if you were legally authorised to work in the US and resided in the US, you couldn't work with GovCloud customers. Or if you are an American temporarily residing in Romania or Canada, then you also can't work with GovCloud customers. I expect the same situation will happen to you. But I am just speculating. A European sovereign cloud is desperately needed for highly sensitive government, military, and national security workloads, and these must be thoroughly vetted to ensure compliance. But for anything else, like personal e-mail or e-commerce? I'm sure there will be a lot of flexibility for non-European contributions, but it will probably be like it currently is: open source projects spanning the globe.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  I don't really intend my services to be used by EU Govt's but rather just individuals/businesses even and if the EU govt. actually requires it at that point, I genuinely don't mind travelling to European and living there if things do come out as this (if EU provides me & maybe my family a visa ie) & am willing to cooperate consultancy work with EU govt. or others as well My focus was on the more of a Eu-alternatives kind of thing. I want my idea of privacy to be aligned and EU seems perfect for that. I want to provide sustainability in an idea & can establish an EU company or partner up with one. My question is that I would still live in India for the most part starting out & I might be unable to make an EU company in the start too but if I am required, then I will do so Aside from this, I am willing to use only EU services internally for my product as well as I mentioned. is there any way that I can still align myself with the EU-alternatives mission? Might sound a bit strange but I want to come into Eu but I can't because immigration is hard/expenses and I want to come to Europe when I finally figure out things/have a decent product in the first place. Some people told me to create an EU company which holds an Indian company as a consultancy firm and you can be part of both and manage to establish a Data sharing policy given that I can access EU data from Indian soil so If I can do something about it. I am not really familiar with EU laws tho so I am interested to hear more from people actually interested.
cess11 9mo ago
With permits and fees and accounting assistance you'd probably land around 1500 per year having a OÜ company in Estonia. If you aren't going to make more than that I don't really see the point of having a company, you might as well save up that amount in cash and hold it in case you personally become liable from whatever activity you want to do.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Yea probably doesn't make sense for just starting out. I think this might be the only option available right? Do you know of any other option perhaps cheaper than this? I think I can only promise at this point that if project becomes worth it ie. makes reasonably lot more than >1500 per year then the project might migrate to as such. I was seeing an estimates of 300$-400$ on internet and I assumed that was expensive (here, the MSME's don't even require a company formation itself & you get benefits of payment dispute collection & investment from govts directly and lower rate loans and you can get it all online just using aadhaar card which everyone has) LLC's are a bit of a mess with accounting (I actually wanted to be chartered accountant during my middle school so I saw they make a bank in fees comparatively too) but its still pretty reasonable. Anyways, what would be the best bet, would this still be the best bet or is there anything which can allow for something say cheaper/easier? Would say having an European co-founder might help comparatively in the fees/other options?
  - cess11 9mo ago
    Estonia is the easiest option, they've aimed explicitly for attracting foreigners starting companies in their jurisdiction without actually moving there. I'm not aware of any similar regulations elsewhere in the EU, typically you need at least one local on the board or something like that. If you squeeze it you could probably get down to 3-400 euros per year starting from the second year (due to one-time fees the first year) if you do your own books and taxes and whatnot, but just paying upfront for keeping things neat according to the local bureaucracy is likely a kind of convenience you'd want. I'd say you should start buying some services from european infra and compute providers and see if your ideas make money. You can get away with very little if you get some storage and processing time through e.g. Scaleway or Hetzner, and with a bit of fiddling I expect them to sell to you regardless of whether you have a company or not. If you start making money enter some Hetzner auction and get real hardware, cost will be predictable and typically you get a lot for the money.
alephnerd 9mo ago
> Some data sharing arrangement can be generated... The EU and India are starting to work on formalizing a data transfer mechanism similar to the EU-US Data Transfer Mechanism (DTM) as part of the EU-India TTC [0] (a US-EU TTC was a a precursor to formalizing the EU-US DTM). Depending on how the EU-India FTA shakes out (signing after Republic Day on January 27th), it might make it easier to "India-wash" American services exports (which is already what is happening). The fact that an EU "sovereign" cloud like STACKIT is using American-Israeli security software [1] (though they did open an office in Prague to outsource some development, but is largely done in Israel I believe) and Google Workspaces [2] as part of it's sovereign cloud initiative highlights how it's all HN bark with little-to-no bite. That said, kudos to SpaceTime [3] for trying to leverage the momentum to build a GTM channel via NukeProof. [0] - https://in.boell.org/en/2025/05/27/tapping-momentum-eu-india-trade-and-technology-council https://in.boell.org/en/2025/05/27/tapping-momentum-eu-india... [1] - https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-schwarz-digits-strategic-partnership/ https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-schwarz-di... [2] - https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2024/companies-of-schwarz-group-and-google-to-sign-partnership https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2024/companies-of-sc... [3] - https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-bring-data-sovereignty-back-to-europe/ https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-br...
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Thanks, good to see EU and India make a deal, might help my idea personally. But this is the first time I hear someone mention "India-wash" American services exports? What do you mean in this context? I hope it's nothing deregoratory but I am simply confused by this term. Personally I meant either hosting open source software or building my own open source software and hosting it for the most part imo. I don't know what you mean by India-wash though?
  - alephnerd 9mo ago
    > I don't know what you mean by India-wash though? For examples - should EU-US digital services be impacted by larger diplomatic spat, as much of GCP's development and leadership is colocated in HYD, if needed leadership and operations could become part of Google Cloud India Pvt Ltd [0], so an "American" BigTech company like Google Cloud can continue to operate like normal. Most American (and Israeli) tech companies have an Indian subsidiary that can do such a motion. > Personally I meant either hosting open source software or building my own open source software and hosting it for the most part imo You can contribute OSS on your own, but from personal experience the EU is primarily looking to it's private sector players who themselves are largely using American (but developed in India) or Israeli closed source products under the hood, or at most open-core. A Stallman or Doctorow style open source advocate isn't getting much airtime in the corridors that matter. Heck, this initiative is itself a lead-gen initiative by closed source SpaceTime [1]. > I hope it's nothing deregoratory It's more derogatory to EU initiatives than India. All these flashy announcements hide the fact that most businesses and organizations in the EU continue to operate using non-EU developed software and continue to do so. Yet any attempt at building a durable long term foundation a la the Draghi report is ignored, as Draghi himself pointed out a couple months back [2]. Heck, the much touted EU-Mercosur FTA has just been frozen barely a couple hours ago [3] [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/2026164D:IN https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/2026164D:IN [1] - https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-bring-data-sovereignty-back-to-europe/ https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-br... [2] - https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/business/20250916-mario-draghi-warns-europe-is-falling-further-behind-us-china-due-to-government-complacency https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/business/20250916-mario... [3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-lawmakers-vote-whether-launch-legal-challenge-mercosur-trade-deal-2026-01-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-lawmakers-vote-whether-laun...
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Edit/Update: After countless discussions in here and other (thanks to everyone for giving suggestions!) I have decided to be transparent and here's what I will most likely do if I ever create a company. I would firstly create an Indian company & operate it as such. I will try to be GDPR compliant from day one, and still use EU providers/privacy providing services instead of hyperscalers in general. Instead of trying to get a legal thing which says EU first or India first, I will try to be privacy first, by open sourcing things or relying and contributing to either open source or at the very least source available licenses (so that people can indepdently audit, I prefer using open source but we will see how much monetizable it is, I am not looking for too much money as I am frugal but still I do want sustainability, I might start out source available and pledge to release it open source once the project might reach enough users let's say or I can earn "enough" with a proper definition) So a big emphasis on privacy & sustainability. most EU cloud options are definitely green as well (like Netcup) so I can get that checkbox available as well most likely but there isn't any guarantee but still my point is I would still try to keep Climate change in mind as a factor hopefully too while still optimizing for a good enough price range. I will also create a blog post probably highlighting all of this and also the fact that I am willing to go EU first if my product would focus on EU/actually trends with EU consumers/businesses & then I will establish an estonia company as people have said here and make my Indian company the subsidiary of my estonian company and use either a fin-tech solution either from the start of my Indian company which could support SEPA or other EU solutions or I will do it afterwards with a proper bank account/fin-tech support after I make an estonian company (which I would if my project can make say make some fixed amount of money most likely from EU customers such that the 1000 euros or more becomes a reasonable investment, or If I ever create a EU branch, my point is I will try to make the EU branch the head branch and Indian branch subsidiary and not vice versa hopefully though, currently please take what I am saying with a grain of salt as I can be wrong I usually am, I am just figuring out life :] and how to build and live off of building things that I myself would enjoy working on/the ideas around it like infrastructure decisions etc!) My point is I am very much more open to work with sustainability/privacy goals with a more focus on open source and probably try not to take any VC funding hopefully and still be day one profitable & transparent/sustainable. Nothing's set in stone right now but hopefully I am able to explain what I think about these ideas.

josephg 9mo ago

At its heart, this is about Europe for Europe. People from other countries “contributing” technology solutions to European businesses and government is what got Europe into the strange mess they’re in now. And there’s been a long line of foreign - American - businesses which have promised that European data will always stay on European soil. And it’s quite clear that promise was not always kept. I’m sure your desire to help is genuine. But Europe might need to find their own feet with an initiative like this before accepting help from foreigners.

whizzter 9mo ago
I'd look at it in another way, hyperscalers exist due to code contributed from all around the world, often in the form of open source, Europe going closed and competing against the rest of the world (literally) isn't going to be a path forward. Clients of mine are on hyperscalers due to the ease of deployment,etc but they are focused on lock-in, if ease could be attained in combination with portability then an ecosystem could exist where mid-scaler providers (that exists in abundance in Europe) could have a better chance against the behemoths.
- boilerupnc 9mo ago
  I believe this is one of the drivers for IBM Sovereign Core Announcement recently [0]. “ Technically, IBM Sovereign Core builds on open-source technology from the Red Hat ecosystem. The software uses OpenShift, among other things, and is designed to run on existing infrastructure. Organizations can deploy the platform in on-premises data centers, regional cloud environments, or through local service providers.” * Disclaimer: I’m an IBMer [0]. https://www.techzine.eu/news/privacy-compliance/137981/ibm-launches-sovereign-core-as-the-foundation-for-sovereign-cloud-and-ai/ https://www.techzine.eu/news/privacy-compliance/137981/ibm-l...
- josephg 9mo ago
  > Europe going closed and competing against the rest of the world (literally) isn't going to be a path forward. Yes, I think this might be the actual way to help. Write opensource software that can be used by everyone. Including commercial products in the EU. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have a moat because of how difficult it is to build viable competitors to their products. I'd love to see more opensource libraries and applications chip away at this. How hard would it be to build a self hosted google docs competitor?
philipallstar 9mo ago
> People from other countries “contributing” technology solutions to European businesses and government is what got Europe into the strange mess they’re in now. Well, if Europe existed without them, then Europe likely wouldn't have ever home-grown all the advances from the more entrepreneurially-minded countries.

kevin061 9mo ago

I think you will probably find great difficulty. When I worked at AWS, there was GovCloud, and only American citizens residing in American soil and connecting from American soil were able to give support to these customers. So even if you were legally authorised to work in the US and resided in the US, you couldn't work with GovCloud customers. Or if you are an American temporarily residing in Romania or Canada, then you also can't work with GovCloud customers. I expect the same situation will happen to you. But I am just speculating. A European sovereign cloud is desperately needed for highly sensitive government, military, and national security workloads, and these must be thoroughly vetted to ensure compliance. But for anything else, like personal e-mail or e-commerce? I'm sure there will be a lot of flexibility for non-European contributions, but it will probably be like it currently is: open source projects spanning the globe.

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
I don't really intend my services to be used by EU Govt's but rather just individuals/businesses even and if the EU govt. actually requires it at that point, I genuinely don't mind travelling to European and living there if things do come out as this (if EU provides me & maybe my family a visa ie) & am willing to cooperate consultancy work with EU govt. or others as well My focus was on the more of a Eu-alternatives kind of thing. I want my idea of privacy to be aligned and EU seems perfect for that. I want to provide sustainability in an idea & can establish an EU company or partner up with one. My question is that I would still live in India for the most part starting out & I might be unable to make an EU company in the start too but if I am required, then I will do so Aside from this, I am willing to use only EU services internally for my product as well as I mentioned. is there any way that I can still align myself with the EU-alternatives mission? Might sound a bit strange but I want to come into Eu but I can't because immigration is hard/expenses and I want to come to Europe when I finally figure out things/have a decent product in the first place. Some people told me to create an EU company which holds an Indian company as a consultancy firm and you can be part of both and manage to establish a Data sharing policy given that I can access EU data from Indian soil so If I can do something about it. I am not really familiar with EU laws tho so I am interested to hear more from people actually interested.

cess11 9mo ago

With permits and fees and accounting assistance you'd probably land around 1500 per year having a OÜ company in Estonia. If you aren't going to make more than that I don't really see the point of having a company, you might as well save up that amount in cash and hold it in case you personally become liable from whatever activity you want to do.

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Yea probably doesn't make sense for just starting out. I think this might be the only option available right? Do you know of any other option perhaps cheaper than this? I think I can only promise at this point that if project becomes worth it ie. makes reasonably lot more than >1500 per year then the project might migrate to as such. I was seeing an estimates of 300$-400$ on internet and I assumed that was expensive (here, the MSME's don't even require a company formation itself & you get benefits of payment dispute collection & investment from govts directly and lower rate loans and you can get it all online just using aadhaar card which everyone has) LLC's are a bit of a mess with accounting (I actually wanted to be chartered accountant during my middle school so I saw they make a bank in fees comparatively too) but its still pretty reasonable. Anyways, what would be the best bet, would this still be the best bet or is there anything which can allow for something say cheaper/easier? Would say having an European co-founder might help comparatively in the fees/other options?
- cess11 9mo ago
  Estonia is the easiest option, they've aimed explicitly for attracting foreigners starting companies in their jurisdiction without actually moving there. I'm not aware of any similar regulations elsewhere in the EU, typically you need at least one local on the board or something like that. If you squeeze it you could probably get down to 3-400 euros per year starting from the second year (due to one-time fees the first year) if you do your own books and taxes and whatnot, but just paying upfront for keeping things neat according to the local bureaucracy is likely a kind of convenience you'd want. I'd say you should start buying some services from european infra and compute providers and see if your ideas make money. You can get away with very little if you get some storage and processing time through e.g. Scaleway or Hetzner, and with a bit of fiddling I expect them to sell to you regardless of whether you have a company or not. If you start making money enter some Hetzner auction and get real hardware, cost will be predictable and typically you get a lot for the money.

alephnerd 9mo ago

> Some data sharing arrangement can be generated... The EU and India are starting to work on formalizing a data transfer mechanism similar to the EU-US Data Transfer Mechanism (DTM) as part of the EU-India TTC [0] (a US-EU TTC was a a precursor to formalizing the EU-US DTM). Depending on how the EU-India FTA shakes out (signing after Republic Day on January 27th), it might make it easier to "India-wash" American services exports (which is already what is happening). The fact that an EU "sovereign" cloud like STACKIT is using American-Israeli security software [1] (though they did open an office in Prague to outsource some development, but is largely done in Israel I believe) and Google Workspaces [2] as part of it's sovereign cloud initiative highlights how it's all HN bark with little-to-no bite. That said, kudos to SpaceTime [3] for trying to leverage the momentum to build a GTM channel via NukeProof. [0] - https://in.boell.org/en/2025/05/27/tapping-momentum-eu-india-trade-and-technology-council https://in.boell.org/en/2025/05/27/tapping-momentum-eu-india... [1] - https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-schwarz-digits-strategic-partnership/ https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-schwarz-di... [2] - https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2024/companies-of-schwarz-group-and-google-to-sign-partnership https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2024/companies-of-sc... [3] - https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-bring-data-sovereignty-back-to-europe/ https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-br...

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Thanks, good to see EU and India make a deal, might help my idea personally. But this is the first time I hear someone mention "India-wash" American services exports? What do you mean in this context? I hope it's nothing deregoratory but I am simply confused by this term. Personally I meant either hosting open source software or building my own open source software and hosting it for the most part imo. I don't know what you mean by India-wash though?
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  > I don't know what you mean by India-wash though? For examples - should EU-US digital services be impacted by larger diplomatic spat, as much of GCP's development and leadership is colocated in HYD, if needed leadership and operations could become part of Google Cloud India Pvt Ltd [0], so an "American" BigTech company like Google Cloud can continue to operate like normal. Most American (and Israeli) tech companies have an Indian subsidiary that can do such a motion. > Personally I meant either hosting open source software or building my own open source software and hosting it for the most part imo You can contribute OSS on your own, but from personal experience the EU is primarily looking to it's private sector players who themselves are largely using American (but developed in India) or Israeli closed source products under the hood, or at most open-core. A Stallman or Doctorow style open source advocate isn't getting much airtime in the corridors that matter. Heck, this initiative is itself a lead-gen initiative by closed source SpaceTime [1]. > I hope it's nothing deregoratory It's more derogatory to EU initiatives than India. All these flashy announcements hide the fact that most businesses and organizations in the EU continue to operate using non-EU developed software and continue to do so. Yet any attempt at building a durable long term foundation a la the Draghi report is ignored, as Draghi himself pointed out a couple months back [2]. Heck, the much touted EU-Mercosur FTA has just been frozen barely a couple hours ago [3] [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/2026164D:IN https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/2026164D:IN [1] - https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-bring-data-sovereignty-back-to-europe/ https://spacetime.eu/blog/nuke-proof-alliance-launches-to-br... [2] - https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/business/20250916-mario-draghi-warns-europe-is-falling-further-behind-us-china-due-to-government-complacency https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/business/20250916-mario... [3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-lawmakers-vote-whether-launch-legal-challenge-mercosur-trade-deal-2026-01-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-lawmakers-vote-whether-laun...

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago

Edit/Update: After countless discussions in here and other (thanks to everyone for giving suggestions!) I have decided to be transparent and here's what I will most likely do if I ever create a company. I would firstly create an Indian company & operate it as such. I will try to be GDPR compliant from day one, and still use EU providers/privacy providing services instead of hyperscalers in general. Instead of trying to get a legal thing which says EU first or India first, I will try to be privacy first, by open sourcing things or relying and contributing to either open source or at the very least source available licenses (so that people can indepdently audit, I prefer using open source but we will see how much monetizable it is, I am not looking for too much money as I am frugal but still I do want sustainability, I might start out source available and pledge to release it open source once the project might reach enough users let's say or I can earn "enough" with a proper definition) So a big emphasis on privacy & sustainability. most EU cloud options are definitely green as well (like Netcup) so I can get that checkbox available as well most likely but there isn't any guarantee but still my point is I would still try to keep Climate change in mind as a factor hopefully too while still optimizing for a good enough price range. I will also create a blog post probably highlighting all of this and also the fact that I am willing to go EU first if my product would focus on EU/actually trends with EU consumers/businesses & then I will establish an estonia company as people have said here and make my Indian company the subsidiary of my estonian company and use either a fin-tech solution either from the start of my Indian company which could support SEPA or other EU solutions or I will do it afterwards with a proper bank account/fin-tech support after I make an estonian company (which I would if my project can make say make some fixed amount of money most likely from EU customers such that the 1000 euros or more becomes a reasonable investment, or If I ever create a EU branch, my point is I will try to make the EU branch the head branch and Indian branch subsidiary and not vice versa hopefully though, currently please take what I am saying with a grain of salt as I can be wrong I usually am, I am just figuring out life :] and how to build and live off of building things that I myself would enjoy working on/the ideas around it like infrastructure decisions etc!) My point is I am very much more open to work with sustainability/privacy goals with a more focus on open source and probably try not to take any VC funding hopefully and still be day one profitable & transparent/sustainable. Nothing's set in stone right now but hopefully I am able to explain what I think about these ideas.