this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
71 points (85.9% liked)

BuyFromEU

5664 readers
439 users here now

Welcome to BuyFromEU - A community dedicated to supporting European-made goods and services!

Feel free to post, comment and vote, be excellent to each other and follow the rules.

We also invite you to subscribe to:

Logo generated with mistral le chat Banner by Christian Lue on unsplash.com

founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
 

While "buy from EU" sounds reasonable (and it is, in terms of physical goods that shouldnt rely on huge travels around the world), it is dangerously intertwined with protectionism.

Politicians really like the idea of protectionism, but it doesnt help in terms of software, which is a big topic in here.

Open Source / Free Software is always global, doesnt discriminate against contributors from any country (may it be sanctioned or not).

I know a lot of really shitty proprietary software from the EU that I would always trade for free software from a global community.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FortyTwo@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

It depends on what your goal is. I used to share your opinion, but find myself increasingly of the opinion that these ideals must be kept separate. Much as I like the idea of open source, not all open source applications or crowd-sourced data can keep up with companies with hundreds or thousands of people actually responsible for it. Similarly, when it comes to innovation, large resources and private investments are needed. If we focus too much on requiring every single thing related to software being open source, we risk the entire effort failing before taking off.

Open source is great, and if you care especially much about this topic that's also great, but it's still quite niche (the general public won't care), while geopolitical sovereignty is a big topic many are rapidly coming to appreciate. Let's start with this part where there's already substantial agreement within the population instead of necessarily packaging them together. Switching over from sending our money to the US for the privilege of dependence to investing our money into our own companies seems a relatively easy and well supported first step, over European and open source and non-addictive and no obnoxious ads and low energy consumption and and and. All all worthwhile causes, but insisting on all at once is doomed to fail. IMO it's better to move in steps, and start with the low-hanging fruit.