Sovereignty - perspectives, paths and what Europe has to do
You can't download sovereignty, you have to built it
I’m extremely tired of this sovereignty discussion. Many people get so much wrong in it, point out the obvious things, can’t acknowledge their own interests, and are not able to find a rational middle ground.
Sovereignty is a question of perspective
“We”, as Europeans, discuss Sovereignty as it would be a globally settled term that describes the technical possibility of freedom of choice while respecting all of our thousands of rules. But sovereignty is universal. USA is sovereign because they have since decades a booming digital ecosystem, and where the market lacks funding the government and military jumps in. China is sovereign because they don’t want to be dependent on the US, and has invested billions of … Dollars… in creating its own, and open source, ecosystem.
Europe is not sovereign, because we just don’t invest, but also because we have to acknowledge that we are many. Many countries, many ideas, many personalities. Comparing the US and China with Europe is so stupid, like talking about Africa as if it were one country.
(And yes, the EU, and local Governments spend some millions here and there.) What you need is for the market to spend enough money too. Every large enterprise in Europe takes money, takes free and open source. But they don’t give back. At least not in a relevant manner. And if they do, like SAP with their project donated via ApeiroRA to the NeoNephos Foundation, people are screaming like “you can’t decide alone that this is the right way” or “how you dare to tell me how to do it” or “it’s not open if it just comes from one company”. Well, then just do it too, contribute, work, open source, invest money and time into it. Complaining is easy; doing something by yourself isn’t. Huh?
Perspectives
Back to the topic. What I wanted to say is that first, we need to learn to understand and express that sovereignty looks different from every country you are looking at it.
I always like to think about it this way: Imagine Sovereignty is this Ivory Tower standing in the middle of the country. The country I’m talking about is very bio-diverse. Now, around this tower, far away, are standing people looking at it. Each person represents a country. Some people are standing closer together (Europe), others are farther away from each other (USA, India, China). On our way to the ivory tower, we can see the valley of a thousand rules, the desert of no money, and the swamp of burocrazy. On the other side, there is USA standing. They are not far away from sovereignty, but they are very tightly connected to the ivory tower by the money chain, the political mind eater, and the VC bros pushing you from hype to hype. For every country, this perspective looks different. For some, it is easy and flat, dictating a rule and spending money. Others have no chance than to ask for a helping hand. And for some more, this topic is completely uninteresting.
The point is, if we discuss Sovereignty, we can do that from our EU perspective. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of defining ideas that mean that solutions will become less Sovereign for others. Then we are not better than what we try to get detached from.
Sovereignty is not an ON or OFF; it is a path
In those sovereignty discussions, you often have those naysayers, “We will never become sovereign because of reason A, B, C”. Like many things in live, its not a binary option: Yes or No, You are or You aren’t.
Sovereignty is a path. You don’t ask “Are you sovereign?”, you ask “How sovereign are you?”. That’s the only way you can discuss this. You have many different missions on your way to max out your sovereignty. Some have a focus on legal actions, others on encryption and the protection of IP, and for others on the software.
Sovereignty in the context of IT refers to having control over an organization's technological assets, data, and operations, which can mean ensuring data stays within national borders and laws while respecting those set up.
However, sovereignty is also not free. You have to work for it, you have to spend time on it. Somehow, the tenor is getting louder that every software must be free and open. Where does that nonsense come from? How do you want to develop something enterprise-grade if you don’t pay for it? Because of the goodwill of someone? And don’t come with Linux, that’s the one in a million shot.
Yes, but hardware
The hardware issue in the sovereignty discussion is real. But I think we put to much weight on it. Why?
Hardware is a truly global product. The design for the components, like the chips, is US-made. Most components are produced in Taiwan and China. The raw materials for the production come from around the world, but many mines are owned by China. The chemicals needed for the production often come from Japan and South Korea. Besides the chips, you have a couple of other microcontrollers and components in a server. While they are produced in the same places, the software for it comes from many countries. The machines used to produce chips and other fine-mechanical components come from Europe (the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany). The logistics to transport those around the globe are primarily done by Switzerland, Denmark, France, China, Germany, and Taiwan (the US practically doesn’t play any role in it).
Therefore, a couple of large providers are building their own servers, yet, they need the global supply chain.
The point (1) is, yes, we have on paper a heavy dependence on the hardware. But we don’t depend on the hardware. You don’t like server A, then buy server B, you don’t like that, get server C. Most hardware is exchangeable. (2) If one country, for reasons, wants to cut out others by supplying hardware, that boomerang will come back fast by getting cut out from other required supplies. And to stop this machinery isn’t that simple. Because (3), the digital supply chain is way easier to turn on and off, which is, in these politically interesting times, way simpler to do.
I know, people will still cry on this point, because it is “not our hardware”, but it is also not your Linux or your DNS service.
What Europe has to do
To turn now to the sovereignty perspective in Europe, we do not have many options, but some.
We have to invest in building our own computing capacity and capabilities through EU-based providers. AND we need to follow a second path to build an abstraction layer, that doesn’t care which provider it is running on. I think we don’t consider this abstraction layer enough. Think of it like “if it can run everywhere, and it can run everything, you can build anything, anywhere you need, to the same conditions, or change the infrastructure as you need if conditions are not met”.
Innovation
Aiming to establish something someone has been doing for over 10 years is a nice race, but it's nothing we need to own. We need different approaches to succeed:
Photonic Computing
RISK-V
Neuromorphic Computing
Analog In-Memory Computing
None of them “replaces” classic CPUs/GPUs et al, but either enhances them, or are useful in the edge. So two scenarios are relevant here: 1. Europe's future is maybe less in the cloud and more “on the edge”, in the intersection between Robots, AI, and interacting with the world. 2. Creating and strengthening the partnership and dependency on GPU/CPU providers. While we want to reduce dependencies, providing a unique selling point that is not possible to ignore might make one act more in your way. (Being naive here, but you know, all politics will have an end, in the end :D)
Open Source
The CNCF showed at the last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Europe that more open-source contributions come from the EU than from the US. But at the same time, we spend almost no money on this.
If we want more sovereignty, we have to force or create environments that make it appealing for companies to invest in it. Tax reduction, bonus points in public tenders, whatever is needed. BUT, it must be true and valuable contributions. Not just a bot commenting under PRs.
Additionally, individuals contribute a lot to open source for free. We should give them tax benefits for this, too, and in my opinion, this shouldn’t be small.
We need to battle the narrative that Open Source must be European. Like it has a citizenship… Open Source is global; the thing we can do is give it our values. Most people who state this just want to push their own business, or are hardcore open-source believers (which we all love, but are in their own bubble).
When I started contributing to Kubernets 1.17, I pushed my company to Top 100 contributors. When we were three people contributing, we were in the Top 30, alongside all the global players. If we can do that, why can’t you?
Open source works that way: The more you do for an open source project, the more you are involved and engaged, the more responsibilities you get, and the more you can shape its future. In other words, if you don’t have competencies and don’t move your 🍑 for it, what do you want to influence then? Alternatively, throw dozens of millions on those projects every year.
Politics and Businesses
I don’t want to discuss policy-making; it sucks, yes, but we also need it to make it attractive to companies to invest in such innovative and/or open source topics.
European companies need to find their way to become a little bit bolder and braver to test new things. All of them are wasting money on a lot of useless stuff. But having money to invest in open source, migrating to another cloud provider, or supporting innovative ideas falls short. In my opinion, we can see a huge mismanagement currently happening. Without spending heavy money on those topics, it will not be possible to evolve for local providers.
We somehow lost the capability to co-create. In the past, it was common to work closely with vendors to improve products and make them fit your needs. Now, you just manage contracts and complain if the SLA is not met. Very innovative.
Stop drawing Devils everywhere
In the end, I wanted to highlight that we should stop drawing the devil on everyone’s wall. US big tech has pushed us so far in tech innovation; it’s nothing but pure stupidity to make them what they aren’t. Yes, they might collect your data, but you also use a hell of a lot of stuff for free. And nothing in life is for free.
Also, EU, African, South America or Asian companies don’t wear clean white gloves. It might look better from our perspective, but again, that’s a question of perspective.
Look, I spent a lot of my last 6 years in open source. The one thing I can tell you: without the big players like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Red Hat, Intel, Apple etc. we wouldn’t have such a rich, stable and solid developed open source landscape. And I already see the hardcore free and open-source people commenting under this: “they do it just for their purpose, for their products, that’s not free”. Yes, that’s true, and now? Almost no open source solution would have made it to an enterprise-grade ready state without someone believing in and investing in it. Also not Linux.
For Europe, I hope we learn to invest more, be more flexible, just do more, without discussing less. You learn when you fail, not when you debate about potential failure you never experience. And innovation happens at the same place where you fail a lot.