The code that is used to dispatch high-school graduates according to their choice was recently audited by the Court of Auditors[0], and the StopCOVID application's source code was released[1].
The problem is that innovation is just a buzzword. They still hand out millions to private actors like Atos, Accenture, etc, while managers are patting themselves on the back and produce the shittiest software possible to get a 10 years maintenance contract that will cost hundreds of millions.
I'm not saying it's better in other countries, I'm just saying that people must realise that the French state should not be trusted to produce high-quality software.
[0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=h... [1]: https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19/stopcovid-android
States should neither be trusted nor simply be involved in producing anything.
That's not what they're for and they are therefore profoundly incapable of doing it.
The simple fact that they are not subjected to competitive pressure is argument enough to prove my point, but it's far from the only one.
Years of experience running their own massive platform before entering the market of renting those services to others?
> they can definitely build software
So can OVH and Rackspace. So why would this project take off better than those established companies?
Don't get me wrong, I'll be cheering this to succeed, but how is this effort different?
Even if running a DC is rocket science (it isn't), it is no particle physics.
The EU should absolutely have its own homegrown tech stack, from silicon to billing. I'd start with an EU run internet backbone and federated object storage in each member state.
I can't see Gaia-x mentioning a ready solution anywhere and it seems very secret and proprietary for a project that's meant to be transparent, federated, and lunching end of this year. (Unless I missed something?)
1. Culture, tradition, apathy, risk-averseness
2. Regulations
Are you an EE? Or a Physicist? I’m wondering why you’ve shrouded ASML in such a golden halo? They’re a company doing basic research in solid state physics, but there are a lot of companies like that.
And the issue here isn’t EU vs US - it’s private vs public industry. ASML is a private company that was spun off of Siemens. Building any kind of a successful venture that actual produces real value is hard - private and public. But public ventures have more money and can’t weed out failures as aggressively as the tough justice of the market.
We’ll have to see how this Gaia-X turns out, but I’m not optimistic.
As for the government vs private venture, I cannot say it's set in stone. China is developing crazy ass infrastructure and companies, all very techy, and none of it is free market. So we've had bad precedents like USSR but also contradicting successful examples like China.
Also - Europe doesn't have to make Gaia-X BETTER than AWS. It doesn't have to become a 1T dollar market cap company. It just needs to do it's job and reduce reliance on China and U.S , that is the whole goal.
Whoa - sorry but that just isn’t true. Other than Huawei which is a Trojan horse for Chinese intelligence services, none of the dynamism in the Chinese economy is happening in state owned companies. NONE! Look at Tencent or Alibaba or Xiaomi or DJI or any of the big Chinese tech leaders. Or look at SMIC - they guys ASML we’re going to make that big sale to! NONE of these are state owned firms. If you seriously think that any of what’s happening now in China is any kind of a counterpoint to the abject failure of the planned economy, I can’t help you.
Maybe Gaia-X will be a success - but it is as I said - making a successful venture is always against the odds. But private industry will realize that sooner and waste less capital on failures. Public funding takes years past clear failure to turn off the money spigot. Good luck!
They are also the _one_ exception where a European company produces tech that's number one worldwide and near impossible to match.
And quite funnily, the first public AWS service wasn't S3 or EC2, it was: SQS (according to Wikipedia) in 2004
I would add a number 0. to your list: Vision, and then they would be in order of importance