> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?

"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.

Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/

[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.

I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.

And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.

To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.