
Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’ - tpush
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-france-gaia-x-cloud-platform-eu-tech-sovereignty/
======
heipei
As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past
few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far
behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit:

\- Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS
you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to
anyone from sales", from your home!

\- When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing /
bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually
spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and
folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place.

\- University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware
of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-
service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company
aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market
rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs.
(for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc.
None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on
anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even
saying we're worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly
grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than
work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10%
premium over their regular European salary.

~~~
thecleaner
Tech salaries in Europe really are a joke. Even American companies don't pay
well here because why would they, the market itself sucks. Combine that with
easy immigration to US for Europeans and good affordable education it seems
unlikely that talented people would choose to stay here. Part of the reason is
the old money in this ecosystem. The problem with digitization in Germany
specifically is that our paperwork is supposedly something to be proud of.
"Germans love paperwork" says every article about German culture as if its a
great thing. Its really sad to hear this. We should hate paperwork and seek to
replace it wherever possible.

~~~
disiplus
germany is also one of the only west countryes that uses fax machines. some of
our customers are sending orders with fax.

~~~
cosmodisk
We had a funny situation with a fax couple of years ago.My bosses were opening
a new company and because of some situation in the bank,they did request to
fax the paperwork to them(email not safe, f2f wasn't an option).I asked my
manager how is he going to do it,as he seemed quite puzzled. Eventually,he
found one dumped behind all the cleaning equipment in the office. Dusted it
off and managed to fax it somehow.This was for one of the largest banks
operating in the UK. Fintech it's not.

~~~
jpfr
Faxes are "signature-proof" for contracts. Scanned documents in an email are
not.

That's the law being broken. Not the tech.

~~~
jason0597
Why not scan a signed document and send it over an encrypted connection via
the internet? Why do we have to send it over fax specifically?

~~~
Nasrudith
Because the law was a special case for fax machines essentially instead of a
generic one and they didn't understand the then very esoteric mathematical
concept of converting arbitrary inputs to data and sending it in arbitrary
ways.

We don't see laws today for unimagined hypotheticals like if governments if
carrying a box with a stable frame of reference anchored wormhole inside that
leads to a remote island with 1 ton of heroin is drug smuggling or not.

------
thamer
It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They _love_ these
moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a
successful service by an American company.

Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10
million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it,
no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to
its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so
exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to
it.

The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government
project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will
typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected
companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts
through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity
to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts.
The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of
cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world
leader in computing.

It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have
zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds
of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one
will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind,
always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.

Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous
projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and
ineptitude. This is more of the same.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant)
[2] [https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-
national...](https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national-
clouds/)

~~~
piokoch
That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far
behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH
provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being
cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really
shines.

Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however
their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many
situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of
migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who
will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get
"X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit,
but not that much).

~~~
heipei
As much as I'd love for Hetzner to step up and start offering more managed
services a la AWS, I just don't see it happening, and if it were I'm not sure
I'd like the side-effects of that. Hetzner is laser-focused on delivering
beefy and very affordable dedicated servers, apparently the way they are able
to trim costs is by running most support functions on auto-pilot and having a
very narrow set of products (servers, storage box, web space) which can
presumably be serviced by a small staff without a high engineering bar. If
they went ahead and started building out complex and highly engineered
services like S3 or even more complex ones I'd see that immediately eating
into their profit margin. Plus: Hetzner is a privately held company.

~~~
moring
Isn't that an opportunity for another company to run managed services like S3,
RDS, SQS, SES _on top of_ Hetzner servers? I see some issues with multiple
companies being involved in support requests, but nothing that can't be
solved.

Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM
hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.

~~~
heipei
You can't just run a service of S3 scale on someone else's datacenter, both
from a technical and a business perspective. You need fine-grained control
over every aspect, from servers to cooling to network fabric to utilization by
other applications etc etc. And you need to be in control of the business
trajectory. If you forecast your S3 clone to grow 1000% every month, you need
to start building actual datacenters and make bulk deals with hardware
suppliers months ahead of time. If you tell Hetzner that they should build a
new datacenter because your demand will outstrip their current ones, they're
gonna shrug their shoulders. Even if you handed them the cash you got from
your VCs for scaling, they might say "eh, not really the direction we want to
take, thanks".

Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a
tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security
Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC
availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.

------
PeterStuer
The problem with European software plays is a monetary problem. EU capital is
much more expensive than US capital (ultimately due to the latter's status as
the 'world reserve' currency due to the enforced petro-dollar regime).

This is why Europe's IT sector is much more focused on B2B servuces/bespoke
developments (low risk business models) and hardware/infrastructure (historic
manufacturing/telecoms legacy).

in terms of software products/B2C/SaaS high risk/hit businessmodels the US can
relax and cherrypick from the European R&D knowing they can buy out any local
player due to cheaper money.

The EU has in the past always declared IT and the Knowledge Economy as
'strategic', but has never protected the sector from US appropriation.

~~~
antpls
That looks like a good analysis to me. There are so many regulations in EU
that if something happens, even organically, it has to be in order with EU
regulations and priorities. The USA appropriation was never out of EU control,
it was rather an accepted strategic choice. (At least, that's how I like to
think about it...)

~~~
cdavid
The US are not exactly regulation-free. Actually, I remember seeing people in
HN who mentioned legal costs for companies tend to be much higher than in
(continental) Europe.

The cost of capital is indeed one of the core issue. In Europe, almost your
only way to get funding is through banks, the whole concept of VC is near
absent.

In terms of innovation, etc. I think a lot of it is cultural essentialist BS.
Just look at OSS: lots of core projects have a strong root in Europe, or even
originated from there. But the culture of VC + university that is one core of
innovation post WW2 in the US is completely absent in Europe. Intuitively, the
fact that the market is more fragmented feels like an issue, but I don't know
of any serious study on that.

------
cageface
American internet companies can address a large, relatively homogeneous market
of 300 million people that all speak the same language. This alone is a big
competitive advantage over any European company.

~~~
9q9
That is true for customer-facing softwre, but would not be relevant in e.g.
semiconductors, compilers, formal verification.

~~~
jogundas
For these B2B applications, it is important to have your potential customers
in your network. One can argue that achieving such a network is easier in the
US, where most of the potential customers presumably are.

------
zoobab
Usual suspects, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, which shows the corruption of our
elites.

~~~
skissane
SAP, for all its many faults, actually has some quite successful products.

Australia's banks have been focused on replacing their legacy IBM mainframe
core banking systems (stuff like CSC Hogan) with something more modern and
non-mainframe. CBA went with SAP, and their project was very successful. (At
least it appears that way from the media, and CBA employees who I've talked to
tell me that it isn't just some good PR, it really has been a great success.)
By contrast, other banks who went with other vendors had less success –
[https://www.itnews.com.au/news/suncorps-oracle-core-
finally-...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/suncorps-oracle-core-finally-
junked-leaves-90m-crater-547982)

~~~
foepys
Counter example: Lidl tried SAP and scrapped the project after they already
invested 1 billion Euro.

~~~
germanier
On the other hand, Aldi Nord now successfully runs SAP HANA/Retail. The at the
same time attempted (and internally highly fought against) move from decentral
to central organization is probably what killed Lidl's SAP project.

~~~
skissane
[1] suggests that part of the problem is that Lidl's business processes were
non-standard, and Lidl decided, rather than change their processes to match
what SAP's solution supported, to instead customise SAP's solution to support
their non-standard processes – and that was the point at which the project
came undone, the SAP customisations couldn't scale to high turnover (but
surely vanilla/uncustomised SAP Retail would not have had this problem)

Lidl's non-standard processes may well be a big part of their business
success. But maybe that was a sign they shouldn't have gone with an off-the-
shelf solution like SAP, and should have stuck with their legacy in-house
system, or tried to build a custom next generation in-house system. And their
experience isn't necessarily transferable to another business whose processes
might be more standard, or who might have more flexibility to alter their
processes to meet the needs of an off-the-shelf solution. And if they'd gone
for some other off-the-shelf solution instead of SAP (such as Oracle or
Infor), they might have had just as many problems – the more customisation
heavy an ERP implementation project is, the greater the risk of failure.

[1] [https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-
sap-d...](https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-
debacle.html)

------
panzagl
This is great because it will be so easy to spin up instances- just provide
your VAT registration, detailed plan for GPDR, mechanism for 'right to be
forgotten', cookie policy, application for any protected region of origin
usages, and pandemic mitigation policy and after a short series of review and
revisions you will be put in the queue for the no-bid government IT contractor
to reject your request because they phased out the instance type you
requested.

------
thiht
I see a lot of hate in this thread regarding a disruption to US hegemony. I
guess that's why we need projects like Gaia-X.

I wholeheartedly hope it will succeed, and given the companies that are
involved in it, I'm pretty confident about it.

~~~
cyborgx7
No kidding. I would love European tech sovereignty. Something I've been
advocating for a long time. I wish the Linux in public institutions that was
tried in Germany caught on.

~~~
maze-le
> I wish the Linux in public institutions that was tried in Germany caught on.

Linux doesn't have a lot of lobbying power, and no important public figures
like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates that would personally intervene on its
behalf.

[https://www.linux-
magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/](https://www.linux-
magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/)

------
jialutu
I get the sentiment, but why not invest in companies like
[https://www.scaleway.com/en/](https://www.scaleway.com/en/) a bit more?

~~~
Jdam
because they are not well connected to politics.

~~~
conradfr
It is owned by Xavier Niel, so yes, they are.

------
Pedrit0
Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US
and the Chinese... This project may look like a joke for people in the Silicon
Valley but everything we do in Europe looks like a joke for Americans. They
laugh at the EU, at our spaceship program, at our industry, at our techs...
Whatever we do they say we are old and finished. OK have good times laughing.
Meanwhile we go on progressing. Discretly, maybe ridiculously, but we do.

~~~
Udik
> Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US
> and the Chinese...

Yes, and it has to start by copying them. Copying to the letter, like
following a recipe, humbly. That's how absolute beginners learn. Not by
proclaiming absurd moonshots (by the way, it's "France and Germany", as usual,
not the EU) and insisting that we'll build something different, new and
innovative and blah blah. Just copy: it will force us to do the things we
don't want to do, it will go against our values and culture. Which are
probably what's holding us back now.

~~~
Pedrit0
I think you did not get the purpose of the project and its context. 1\. What
should we copy ? We already have cloud companies in Europe. The issue is not
about a lack of knowledge about cloud technologies. It is a matter of market
share. Our companies are not big enough to provide adequate services to
european states and sensitive industries. 2\. The goal is not to create from
scratch a European cloud giant that would be able to challenge Chinese and US
powerhouses. It is just way not to rely on them as they cannot be trusted in
any manner when it comes to data management and fair competition. As stated
many times by Trump and Xi Jiping, EU is a competitor or even worse an enemy.
In Europe we share this same bellicose analysis too now. And cloud is a battle
among others, but an important one.

~~~
Udik
True, I don't think we need to copy the technology: that is probably easily
available, you just need good engineers and money. The problem is exactly the
second you mention: why is it that EU companies don't have the market share
that US ones have? Why are our companies not big enough? What prevents
entrepreneurs in Europe from creating tech giants such as the US ones? These
are the things we need to copy- not the technology.

> The goal is not to create from scratch a European cloud giant ... It is just
> way not to rely on them

And how do you avoid relying on them? Are you going to force EU companies to
choose a EU cloud provider, even when they would have preferred a US one? No,
you need to create an offer that is competitive: and once it is, it will be
competitive for everyone, not just our companies.

~~~
Pedrit0
> why is it that EU companies don't have the market share that US ones have?
> Why are our companies not big enough?

They created the Cloud and we arrived late on this market, so we lag,
therefore our companies are not big enough. This FR-GER initiative will secure
market shares for european actors, in order they can grow enough to provide a
sovereign platform for EU companies which need it.

> Are you going to force EU companies to choose a EU cloud provider, even when
> they would have preferred a US one?

All defense/sensitive/state owned companies, administration and maybe banking
companies will not have the choice as they must comply to EU or national rules
about data management. And I guess many european companies competiting with US
and Chinese ones in highly competitive markets where bleeding edge techs and
secrecy matter are looking for sovereign European solutions.

~~~
Udik
> They created the Cloud and we arrived late on this market

Same for the web, for the mobile, and for many other sectors. We seem to be
always late on the market, why is it so?

> All defense/sensitive/state owned companies, administration and maybe
> banking companies will not have the choice

Ok, so if I understand it correctly the EU is going to regulate out from some
sectors non-EU companies and has to both come up with a legal excuse and to
create some acceptable alternative before the regulation comes in force. And
if the alternative is mediocre it won't be much of an issue because there will
be no choice anyway. But the idea of creating an interoperable standard is
good: it could allow a sane competition between companies to provide a basic
standardised service. I hope it doesn't resolve in the next embarrassment. It
won't solve our problem of constantly lagging in most consumer high tech
sectors anyway.

~~~
Pedrit0
> Same for the web, for the mobile, and for many other sectors. We seem to be
> always late on the market, why is it so?

1.We lost the WWII. The US won it and took the leadership of the world. At a
moment we were rebuilding our continent, they developed very quickly and took
a competitive advantage in many sectors. We managed to catch-up in some but
not in others. And since the beginning IT has always been an American thing
(apart Minitel in France in the 80's). The information era was shaped by IBM,
Bell, Intel, Microsoft. Not by Thomson, Siemens or Olivetti.

2.The US are very good at selling stuff and making profit. But as I stated in
another post this also has big downsides.

3\. Europe is not a country and there are 27 economic policies and strategies
which does not help European companies...

4\. I think mobile developed first in Europe (Nokia ?)and not in the US but
this is detail.

. > And if the alternative is mediocre it won't be much of an issue because
there will be no choice anyway.

This move is not about making good products or value the european savoir-
faire. It is about geopolitics.

~~~
Udik
> And since the beginning IT has always been an American thing

> apart Minitel in France in the 80's

> Thomson, Siemens or Olivetti.

> I think mobile developed first in Europe (Nokia ?)

Yep. And let's not forget that the www was invented by an Englishman in
Geneva.

So how come we seem to be losing all the battles in the end? I agree that
there's geopolitical explanations too: another commenter mentioned that the
petro-dollar system grant the US with a much lower cost of money- and it's not
a small thing. If I understand it correctly, the US acts as the world's bank:
prints money that everybody is forced to use and emits in exchange debt titles
that everybody wants to buy. That's a huge advantage.

But let's not forget that in the US rules are simpler and companies often have
a relative freedom to break them if the public finds it useful; that they can
easily downsize and fire underperforming people in case of need; that
professionalism and expertise are highly valued; that public administrations
are open and welcome new initiatives (imagine in the EU a small private
company like SpaceX was at the beginning getting multi-billion contracts from
ESA...).

While in France you have judges ordering (shamelessly, in my view) that Google
both _has_ to do a certain job _and_ pay for the privilege of doing it.

~~~
Pedrit0
> So how come we seem to be losing all the battles in the end?

Vast question, and apart the geopolitical reasons, I could not say why we are
unable to develop in specific sectors such as IT. I could not speak about
whole Europe, but France, my country has serious issues with transforming a
tech success into an economic success. If you take this Minitel story for
example : the US would have made it a worlwide success 15 years before
Internet emerged with hundred of billions of profits. In France it was
distributed almost freely to families by the state owned phone company. So it
became a booster to the national economy but not much more than that. It never
became a standard, never went out of France and never allowed us to become an
early IT champion... We simply have different mindsets. But I think that other
European countries are far better than us in this domain.

> While in France you have judges ordering (shamelessly, in my view) that
> Google both has to do a certain job and pay for the privilege of doing it.

Again this is geopolitics. In France Google is perceived as a dangerous
company for our European interest. MOreover like other US tech companies, they
cheat to avoid their tax duty in France, which infuriates many people. So all
the actions intended against Google are part of a dirty war. These actions are
undoubtly unfair. But do not forget Google actively lobbies against our
governements at the EU level, try to prevent us from passing laws to regulate
our data privacy issues, help the US agencies to spy on us... They are not our
friends.

------
dalf
Perhaps an out of topic comment.

I've been working for one of these CORDIS European projects :
[https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en](https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en)

The project was politically driven while most of the slides were selling
dreams. As usual in this kind of project

\- there was a schedule carved in stone

\- the Conway's law gets a beautiful practical example

so the research becomes quickly a joke.

Some people:

\- worked on out of topic subjects. At least no harm.

\- criticized because of external/past/personal/out of topic reasons.

\- criticized the work of others while doing literally nothing. My boss knew
it, but since they are well known to wrote nice documents to get the fund for
many years.

\- worked very hard while being criticized through hidden communication.

\- were here because of the data.

\- were here to get the technology if by luck it ends up to be working
project.

The usual burdens, I guess, but it basically kills the motivation (it is my
experience in one specific project). In the end, people went to the different
meetings to see Europe.

It seems some other projects are driven in the same way according to what I
have heard.

It is only a sum up of experience. YMMV.

I sincerely hope that Gaia-X will be managed in better way.

------
bickfordb
AWS/AZURE/GCP aren't exactly beloved by their customers, product quality is
sporadic, domiciling things with the US is more questionable than ever before,
and their margins are high. This seems like a great time for solid
international (ie non-US) competition.

------
ksec
If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH?

Generally speaking, I dont think any of the Europeans have _technical_
problems, I think they have a Product Placement, Marketing and Sales problem.
And I think it is more or a cultural issue. ( Not saying it is a bad thing )

~~~
dgellow
IMHO the broader issue is that there isn’t a european culture or market.
Instead you have a fragmented set of markets, each with their own expectations
and regulations. That makes it incredibly hard to create a product that serves
Europe as a whole instead of just Germany, or France, or something else.

Even just the basics are way harder than they should be, for example the lack
of a common language is already a pain to deal with.

------
mytailorisrich
This once again ignores what are probably more profound issues.

Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to
never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe.

SAP is mentioned, which is a giant. But it is 50 years old. This is not the
type of company that is going to challenge the status quo and come up with
disrupting technology.

I think countries like France and Germany should really look at their tech and
business environments, including universities, finance, tax, labour law, etc.

~~~
jonathanstrange
...and the issue is that the products are too expensive due to a vast number
of factors. I'm just a private hobby developer, so maybe there are markets
where this is different. But when I was looking for cold storage backup and
virtual hosting providers in the EU none of the offers were even remotely
competitive with US offers. They're twice or even more as expensive and less
reputable.

Especially concerning backup this bothers me a lot. I'm currently with
Crashplan for Small Business and it works well. I would _love to_ have all my
data on EU servers, but where is the EU backup solution with decent backup
software that allows me to store more than 2 TB of data for $3.06 per month?

I can't see how this French initiative would change this. If you look up
"Gaia-x" it doesn't even come with a web page where you can _buy the product_
or check out its pricing and conditions. It's nebulous vaporware - so typical.

------
FridgeSeal
> That is already far too late, according to analysts at Gartner, who forecast
> that the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17% to $228
> billion this year. “The leading cloud providers have already moved quickly
> to build up this market,” said Gartner analyst Rene Buest.

Person not poised to make exorbitant money off venture thinks venture a waste
of time. Alternatively, person who might lose money if venture goes ahead
thinks venture a waste of time.

~~~
ludamad
But also, point that speaks for itself. Either you agree that market
entrenchment will be a huge obstacle or you don't

------
tannhaeuser
Does anybody have any _technical_ details to share about Gaia-X? I mean
service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around
since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there
exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they
intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick
existing tech?

~~~
mlatu
Well, if you know German there is this longwinded brochure:

[https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-
Welt...](https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-
projekt-gaia-x.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=24)

~~~
tannhaeuser
Thanks, that's exactly what I feared and would call strategical/non-technical
;) I mean it mentions "open source technologies", and contains a vague general
description of the concept of identity providers, and, of course, platitudes a
la "industry 4.0" but nothing concrete. I want to hear about protocols,
operating systems/POSIX/Linux, integration into TelCo provisioning platforms
maybe if that's on the radar and they want to have 5G on board, payment
standards, containers (chroot, VMs, Docker-like/Linux-only namespace
containers, or whatever), or even IP networking. Also, going by the stock
photos and the use case example, I'm a bit surprised this is targetting
industry applications rather than public authorities, schools, medical etc.

------
mmmBacon
I don’t see how a government bureaucracy can compete with Azure, AWS, and GCP.

~~~
jackcosgrove
There were similar pronouncements made fifteen years ago or so about making a
European search engine.

~~~
djohnston
Is there a European search engine?

~~~
mc32
Yandex is European, but maybe not the right kind of European.

~~~
djohnston
yeah definitely not what the eu means when they discuss technical sovereignty
lol

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I wonder how much they will be paying their software developers. Right now, a
senior developer that really understands cloud and distributed computing can
make more than $500,000/yr at Amazon, Azure, or Microsoft. If they want to
attract the talent to build this, they are going to have to pay a lot more
than they are used to paying for software engineers.

~~~
ReticentVole
USA Payroll tax: 15.3% combined, first $127,000 only (3.89% effective)

France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965.

USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions

France Income Tax: 50%.

So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee
will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF)
means consumer purchases are also more expensive. If you are in Paris, you're
at a latitude 48.8N, SF 37.7N.

The same is true for moving to other Anglo countries: UK, Canada, Australia
have similar lower-tax regimes.

France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund
their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their
competitiveness.

~~~
adev_
> France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to
> fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining
> their competitiveness

That's a common bashing legend that France/Germany are taxe hell and it is
mainly bullshit.

I am currently live in France with salary over 100k and my effective taxe rate
is under 20%.

Both France and Germany (and almost every European country) have a gazillion
way of reducing _legally_ your taxe bill if you do it right.

Currently, some of my colleagues in Switzerland, a well known taxe heaven, pay
more taxe than I do.

~~~
hydraxis
Are you including social contributions of employer and employee in your 20%
tax rate?

Because these are definitively taxes that should be included.

If yes, I am really curious to know how this is possible

~~~
adev_
> Are you including social contributions of employer and employee in your 20%
> tax rate?

Only income taxes. The employer taxes are mainly pension / health insurance.

~~~
hydraxis
Compare for example with Denmark where the social contributions are close to 0
and the income tax up to 50%.

The total of the employment taxes paid in Denmark is still lower than the
total in France.

~~~
adev_
Denmark seems to be a particular case compared to other OECD countries.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_in_Europe#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_in_Europe#/media/File:Payroll_and_income_tax_by_country.png)

~~~
hydraxis
Yes, I chose this extreme example on purpose to show that evaluating only the
income tax is not meaningful.

------
acd
I hope Gaia-X will be built as an Open source project. Because of economics of
scale closed source companies usually cannot compete with Open source
projects. Meaning that open source projects can attract more developers from
different companies and backgrounds than closed source. Plus if its open
source everyone in the world benefits not just Europe.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale)
[https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-
open-s...](https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-open-source)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
source_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics)

------
Zenst
Interesting that Lidl only recently made news about moves into the cloud
computing area.

Reading the article "German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, speaking in
Berlin, described Gaia-X as a “moonshot” that would help reassert Europe’s
technological sovereignty, and invited other countries and companies to join."
It's not clear if this is limited to European based countries and companies
only and if not, kinda moots the statement a bit.

Be interesting how this progresses and competition is good and some standards
would also work well. Though I do fear that the usual company suspects will
pile into this pie just because they have a European satellite office, like
Amazon, Google, Microsoft.....

I hope this is an EU wide initiative and not just another FraGer based one for
many reasons.

So many questions and could just be a tool to bash the Tech giants into
opening up more.

Further reading upon this: [https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-
entity-gaia...](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia-
x-established-european-cloud)

[https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-
Welt...](https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-
projekt-gaia-x-executive-summary.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=6-platform-now-
official/)

------
arcturus17
The article seems to conflate cloud services with merely _storing_ data. Of
course that's part of any cloud stack, but to the average HN reader it is
evident that cloud services are much more than that, such as running software
and _transforming_ data.

I think this might be a reflection of a misunderstanding that also happens on
a higher level in European politics. Cloud services are much more than just
"computers that store data" and the political implications of data sovereignty
or what have you.

Cloud services are insanely complex _systems_ built on the latest advances in
areas like operating systems, networking, hardware, etc.

You don't get there with political statements of good-will, even when they're
backed by what looks like a non-committal, lukewarm coalition of private
companies. You don't stumble upon it by just saying "Ha! We need a Europe
response to cloud services!"

You get there by being obssessive and single-minded about the problem,
employing all your energy and focus on the task at hand, most likely fueled by
the ambition of a lucrative or economically strategic incentive.

It saddens me as a European that the latter is what Europe seems to lack
sometimes, and this initiative doesn't give me any hope for a change of
course.

------
motohagiography
The description of Gaia-X and that of old world culture sounds like a standard
government/enterprise project with all the same problems. The US model comes
from venture funding, where you seed 10 firms solving the same type of
problem, and the most desirable result prevails. The institutional model of
increasing stakeholders to produce something that satisfies all of them is
what makes enterprise development such a farce. The mentality is captured in
the criticism that something is, "underfunded," which is the expression of a
worldview that "funding," comes from some welfare oriented source, and not
earned as compensation for providing value. The strategies to "get funding,"
vs. the ones that earn revenue are largely orthogonal, and people with the
funding mentality have in effect the opposite of the "growth mindset," that is
necessary to build things others want.

These development cultures build lots of things, just very few things that
anyone uses willingly. It's just more solutions to govern, not tools people
need.

------
k__
I'm from Germany and just last week I saw a building with a sign.

 _OVH - Biggest Hoster in Europe_

I never heard of this company in my life.

I looked at their offering and they were basically selling 20 year old
technology. Nothing compared to AWS, Azure, or Google.

Germany is so far behind in IT, it's crazy.

I also stopped reading German IT news 10 years ago, because they are always
weeks or month late.

All good IT people I knew sooner or later moved to the US.

------
Havoc
>One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is “reversibility”, a principle
that would allow users to easily switch providers.

Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like
docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a
FAAS standard, a load balancer standard?

Bit confused about where they're going with this

~~~
WatchDog
Build a platform based on open source systems like openstack and k8s?

~~~
Havoc
Well that's kinda my question. Modern cloud have like 50+ distinct "things" in
them. I just don't see how they think this can even be standardized without it
being a massive standard. Specific areas are low hanging fruit - like you say
k8s but what they're promising is a pretty comprehensive if you can move from
one provider to another for your cloud needs

------
jariel
This might sound terrible ... but this will come from Scandinavia/Finland or
not at all. Possibly in the form of one or a few, very well thought out
startups and/or standards that the rest of Europe can buy into.

This is not about size, it's about 'getting it right' \- and then having the
system follow along one way or another.

------
Jdam
I think the title of this article sums it up quite well:
[https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-
mi...](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-minister-
launches-euro-cloud-initiative-falls-stage/)

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921)
was earlier on the same topic but since this article has a lot more
information, perhaps we'll merge those comments hither.

------
sek
They are competing with Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Those are not normal
companies.

I also think that people underestimate that this space will get very low
margin eventually and become even more commoditized. Most companies totally
overpaid for IT enterprise solutions the last decades, they are sales driven
and live off lock in effects of their hardware to milk their customers.

Now we got rid of physical hardware then it will take companies another 10
years to figure out that they also don't need 90% of all the cloud solutions
they got sold on. The rest you can run everywhere cloud neutral with
kubernetes or something else.

Will those three companies earn a trillion dollars during that process? Sure.

------
CalRobert
"repository of existing services and resources that are available in the
ecosystem, including the capability to search this repository"

Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random
company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?"

I'm no fan of monocultures and US/Chinese influence but if they want it to
actually work they could say "here's a terraform provider that figures it out
for you". That would be nice. So far it sounds like this is just "we'll make a
list of cloud providers and some of their services"

~~~
thiht
> Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which
> random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?"

Or seen another way: "where can I get a better alternative to the suckish and
overpriced AWS lambda, which also respects my data?".

Perspective. AWS is not the best everywhere.

~~~
klohto
How does AWS not respect your data? And in which way is Lambda suckish? It’s
the leader in serverless workloads and grounds for Firecracker...

------
BiteCode_dev
So, instead of working with well established EU companies like OVH or Lease
Web, they, once again, build-to-fail a sovereing solution.

They will not be able to hire the necessary talent, don't benefit from decades
of expertise, have to build trust with multiple communities plus a client
portfolio and have to pay for building infrastructures.

As @heipei said, Europe mentality is already years late when it's about tech.
And while I do think we desparatly need our own alternative to the US GAFAM
and clouds, this is, once again, a doomed attempt that will mostly enrich a
few well connected people.

------
JeremyS
From the article "The companies will inject an annual €1.5 million combined in
the underlying association, with plans to double the sum later." 1.5 million
... I hope this is a typo.

------
blopeur
This project is still born because they are missing a federated accounting and
payment service at the heart of the platform.

Why? Because it's damn near impossible to deliver such feature for dynamically
orchestrated services from a federation of providers.

Sovereignity, interoperability, compliance is a nice sales pitch. But it seems
that when it comes to getting paid or paying you are on your own. Imagine
trying to pay for hundreds of services from companies spread across dozens of
countries...

~~~
kazen44
how is this a problem? SEPA has already solved this issue?

------
sershe
Alas, looks like a PR move to cobble something together from existing
components by consultants for EUR1.5m a year (from the article, unless I
misread what that is for).

I've been developing backend distributed systems for a while, and kinda want
to have a gig in Europe, so the title got me too excited I guess.

But, my dreams of reinventing the wheel in Europe for a (relatively) high
paycheck aside; what could possibly go wrong? :)

------
supercanuck
Competition is good.

------
mark_l_watson
I wish them good luck. I think that right now the US and China really have a
lock on cloud and AI.

Europe has lead the world in user privacy and rights, so I hope they can
leverage that and bake human rights into their systems. Hetzner is a very good
cloud provider. I would use them exclusively if it were not for the tiny
latency lag between the SouthWest USA (where I live) and Germany.

------
raghava
Had seen [https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-
euro...](https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-european-
cloud-might-fail-c097d14499db) on this topic. Few of the points made sense.

------
fongitosous
this european cloud computing champion already exists: OVH. maybe policies
should help him to grow

------
oneplane
> " a platform joining up cloud-hosting services from dozens of companies,
> allowing business to move their data freely"

This is practically dead before it's created. The other platforms (AWS, GCP
etc.) are hyperscale due to their useful integrated nature of building blocks.
You're not going to get that with a bunch of random vendors. It's hard enough
as it is for a large company to create a somewhat homogenous environment, and
existing projects that are supposed to be multi-vendor like OpenStack (and
CloudStack) are just not on par.

Say you have a few vendors, one runs VMWare, one runs Hyper-V, and you need a
workload with scalable counts of CPUs, and the datacenter of the VMWare guys
is full and you now need to use some of the CPUs in the other datacenter. Are
you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a
machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower
layers resolve it? Probably not.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
> Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I
> want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have
> the lower layers resolve it? Probably not.

Why not? Isn't Kubernetes already most of the way there? (I have only played
with it very briefly, but it looks like it should solve this.

The workload is most likely a container anyways, mostly resolving the "image"
issue, so the key parameters are CPU, storage and RAM. Ignoring dependencies
between containers (e.g. you probably want your web app server and database to
be colocated), for the simplest implementation, couldn't you simply create a
Kubernetes cluster covering VMs from all providers?

It seems like an orchestrator that places your jobs is part of what the
project tries to develop, according to
[https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswirtschaftsminister-Gaia-
X-a...](https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswirtschaftsminister-Gaia-X-als-
weltweiter-Goldstandard-fuer-Cloud-Dienste-4774826.html)

~~~
oneplane
Not: because you would either lose platform-specific functionality between
whatever hypervisor the different vendors happen to use, or you would get
multiple APIs. I'm sure attempts other than libvirt exist, but nobody has
really succeeded. It's all either Xen, KVM, or VMWare so far, and a little bit
of Hyper-V, and none of them are compatible.

------
maelito
France was able to build world-class high speed rail and a very low carbon
electricity grid. They emerged from the government.

Why can't we build alternatives to the big US tech services ? Is it just a
matter of momentum ?

------
zachguo
In terms of geopolitics this is a good move, a superpower should have its own
tech infrastructure.

------
joyceschan
Governement Productions (TM), this is gonna end up like CDC's productions
during the pandemic

------
nemo44x
On one hand, the tech is well enough understood that making a clone is doable.

On the other hand, 2012 called.

------
dzonga
didn't some search engine Cliq shut down, because they had no support in
Europe ? would love to hear their response to those officials

------
rock_hard
Thats really the only thing the Europeans can put together these days...more
policies :(

How about just getting your hands dirty and start building great stuff?

(Former european here)

------
roenxi
There is a really interesting discussion to be had here about if and what the
EUs past policy failing was. Is the issue that they were insufficiently
capitalist and drove all their innovators to the US? Is the issue that they
let their markets too open, and should have copied the Chinese approach? Is
the issue that they shouldn't be concentrating on tech at all and should be
leaving it to people better at it than Europeans?

There is a real litmus test of something in the EU and their technology
situation.

~~~
jialutu
Having been to a few tech conferences held by the EU commission, I would say
the issue is not (wholly) to it being too open. The biggest problem with the
EU is that it is ultimately 27 sovereign states with different language and
cultures and very different economic situations.

What the EU tries to do is to bring these 27 states closer by awarding grants
based on cross-border collaborations (so company A in France needs to
collaborate with company B in Italy) and also helping the poorer states. This
is a very rigid process, hence I guess this is why we've not seen much success
stories so far.

------
jokoon
If China wants tech sovereignty, I don't see why Europe shouldn't. I don't
understand the negative comments here.

The core problem isn't really the innovation, the economics, or europe's
ability to compete with american giants, it's rather geopolitics, privacy,
GDPR, surveillance, industrial espionage, tax havens.

------
pinkfoot
I they are smart they will create an open app store with GMS, etc. compliant
services.

And use EU competition rules to mandate the the most popular apps must be in
there.

------
DeonPenny
I have sadly no faith in europe to get this right. While capitalism is under
fire right now it does one thing better than anything we know right now.
Innovate. I don't see a government competition with a group of smart, capable
people, who would reap all the money from said effort.

------
renewiltord
Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing"
manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence
overall as orgs.

~~~
pyvpx
competence at what, exactly?

~~~
allendoerfer
They are not shielding their market, putting everything behind a firewall,
requiring joint ventures. Instead they actually respect human rights and the
power of law. They don’t even use a non-latin language.

~~~
hackissimo123
I think the residents of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the entirety of central and eastern Europe
(except Romania) would be surprised to hear that they don't speak a Latin
language.

~~~
allendoerfer
German might not be a Latin language, but has very obvious roots there. Which
are btw. more apparent than in English, because the grammar has not been
simplified yet. I suspect the way to learn both languages is not that
different. It also has to be way easier if you already know a similiar
language, which was my point.

~~~
hackissimo123
I speak five European languages including German. What you say is the opposite
of the truth - English has _far_ more Latin influence than German. By one
estimate around a third of English words are derived from Latin (via Norman
French, thanks to the Norman conquest of Britain in the 11th century.) German
doesn't have nearly as many Latin words.

It's true that German and Latin both have case systems (accusative,
nominative, etc.), but German didn't get this from Latin - they both inherited
it independently from proto-Indo-European, their common ancestor. English used
to have a case system too but it's been lost.

With that being said, my original post had a stupid mistake: I meant to imply
that the listed countries _don 't_ speak a Latin language, not that they do.

~~~
allendoerfer
> With that being said, my original post had a stupid mistake: I meant to
> imply that the listed countries don't speak a Latin language, not that they
> do.

I got that.

You are right, German is per definition not a latin language. You win 5
internet points, even though you still did not get the context of my original
post, which is why you were downvoted.

> I speak five European languages including German. What you say is the
> opposite of the truth - English has far more Latin influence than German.

Nobody is interested in how many European languages I speak and it does not
matter here, but I do speak German and English and have studied Latin. English
might have more Latin words, but German feels way more like Latin than English
does, because it is more structured and rule-based, has less exceptions
(funnily enough because it has had less influence from French aka Latin).

It is not only about a case system, it's also gender of words, conjugation of
verbs and the whole structure of sentences. English feels more linearly "one
word comes after the other"-style, while German and Latin both rely more on
rules and sentences can (or sometimes have to) be taken apart piece by piece.
One thing they have in common is the ability to form long sentences with the
predicate all the way at the end, making the listener remember the whole thing
before finally getting the actual meaning.

Another important point is: You can mostly just read both Latin and German,
because words are pronounced the same way they are written. We might pronounce
some Latin words differently than they were originally prounounced, but since
Italian behaves the same, we should be reasonably close.

------
plandis
> but would instead referee a common set of European rules.

That sounds less like innovation and more like regulation to hinder foreign
companies. The US should retaliate economically if that becomes the case.

~~~
tastroder
Realistically that will just yield guidelines on GDPR compliance, which was
already adopted by major providers, and interoperability. Even if this non-
political actor would lead to regulatory advice, we already have similar
guidelines in areas like security, framing that alone as anti-competitive
seems somewhat odd. I doubt a major cloud provider is "hindered" by
suggestions such as "give your users something to control where their data
goes" / "give your users the ability to get their data back out of your
infrastructure". Startups might have problems work existing regulation that
essentially says "make sure this data doesn't leave the country/union" but I
don't see much difference to investing in any other compliance on the other
side of the pond there.

------
baxtr
This is so sad. As a European I would love to see some Internet giants
created. Everybody says it's because we don't have homogenous market and so
on. But my hunch is it is something different: Existing European companies are
much more protected than their US counterparts, or even their UK counterparts.
Think ThomasCook - would have been definitely been "saved" like TUI in
Germany. That doesn't happen that much in the US I believe. Instead new comers
are generated at a higher rate creating completely new markets, think Tesla,
Facebook, amazon etc. That entire life cycle of companies dying and being
newly born seems somewhat skewed over here.

~~~
brmgb
> Existing European companies are much more protected than their US
> counterparts

That's a complete myth. The USA affords a lot of direct and indirect
protection to its companies, far more than Europe does usually.

You have things like the "Buy American Act" ensuring US companies don't face
external competition for public markets, a different system of measures and
crucially norms slowing the entry of external actors and a strong cultural
emphasis amongst the population on economic patriotism and buying American
which mostly doesn't exist in Europe.

