Linux

I'm a USian and also have worked in tech for decades. I hope Europe succeeds, there needs to be competition.

The US is in a similar position when it comes to manufacturing. The various business interests have sold our country's capabilities in exchange for short-term profits.

Offshoring was wildly profitable for decades, why pay people domestically to do a thing when you can pay less to people in another country to do the same thing. Thanks to this, we now import the vast majority of things from overseas because we have little to no domestic manufacturing capability. The massive industrial manufacturing base that carried the US economy after WWII was deconstructed in a few decades

Most of the money that was being poured into US tech companies from all around the world was funneled back out into foreign manufacturing centers who now control the market for electronics hardware. Apple has spent hundreds of BILLIONS investing in SE Asia's electronic hardware manufacturing industry because it was cheaper. This helped create an entire industry that renders any attempt to create domestic production unprofitable.

The US made a lot of billionaires and not much else. Today our tech sector is largely just software running on hardware that was manufactured elsewhere and imported. (It would be a shame if someone invented a thing which could create software at scale)

The only reason that the US remains dominant in these fields is because we've strong armed every other country into accepting our Intellectual Property laws which subordinates your laws and regulations into a system for enforcing our monopoly.

Once that link is broken, and the EU imports their own hardware and writes their own software irregardless of US IP laws then the US tech sector will collapse.

Here's Cory Doctorow explaining what that would look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs

It's viable because all of the important components are open source. That's the entire genius of open source, if you're capable enough then you're immune to future changes. You can fork a project and take over development. It only costs developers and that's well within the budget of a modern western country.

Any country who is going to undertake the effort to move away from Windows will have the resources to support distros which align with their country's interest or create their own. Even North Korea has their own distro of Linux, I'm sure the EU countries can find the talent required to ensure their software meets their needs.

As an individual, you're right. You're largely at the whims of the people who volunteer their time to the kernel, the software ecosystem and the individual distributions. If you have infinite money then those problems become a line item in your budget.

I certainly don't assume that.

I expect your elites to operate with the same selfish motivations as ours. That includes wanting to exploit the situation in order to utilize public funds to grow a private tech sector where they stand to profit immensely.

They will also want to protect themselves personally from continuing to be predated on by their elite counterparts in the US who utilize this technological dependency for spying and coercive tactics.