Snickers for example shows first "Alprose" which I never heard, it's a small company that's not even common IN Switzerland. It lists Julius mainl which if it does chocolate its far from their actual business. And half of the other companies also seem regional niche stuff.
I can not comment on the vibe coded issue or not, but the name
Alprose is not really a surprising name at all.
Alps are "Die Alpen" in german, and rose is rose too. So, a rose
or a flower in a mountaineous area. It kind of fits to Switzerland.
Renaming operations are often strange: for instance, the name
Raider before it then became Twix. I always found the renaming
part peculiar; guess Twix is easier to market than Raider but
both names are strange to begin with.
I could also swear that Raider tasted better than Twix, but this
could be to my aging cells no longer being as performant as they
once were. Or they changed the recipe to the worse.
Having said that, I guess that website was AI slop generated, so no wonder it has low quality. I try to avoid AI in general, in particular the low quality slops; sadly youtube is being infected with it, I can no longer watch shorts - so many are just AI spam nowadays.
These days the latest trend is to vibe code Adobe and MS alternatives from scratch and they are pretty good, Europe has a golden chance of dropping US software vendors.
Apparently EU bureaucrats think that the MS office alternatives are shitty[0], well they can just tell an AI agent whats shitty and get it fixed.
"Element Pro" is not Open Source. Nor does it even come from the EU. From the outside it's incomprehensible anyone in EU bureaucracy would want something like this, given that there are good OS alternatives.
Any open source software should be considered "international" and there are a lot of European contributions to that universe.
The topic of "European" programming languages is highly interesting in the sense that there were a lot of highly developments done in Europe, but they are often less noticed than the counterparts popular in the US. The reason to look more into them would not be so much today's independence, but more to resurrect good concepts that kind of got ignored by history.
There is the ISLisp standard, of course the treasure chest of languages and works boy Nikolas Wirth and so much more. Europe has many great universities, their creations usually are free.
Of course, you could call Python an European language and Go heavily draws from the Wirth's language family.
The big difference between ISO languages, which were more relevant during cold war days and the modern open source approach is who gets to contribute the code and where are those repos hosted.
Khronos and RISC-V now have locations outside US for a reason.
Are you proposing forks of existing languages but in gitlab, and only european can approve PRs? Or a new language and OS? How does that work in practice when open source is public and users can have VPNs?
How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?. Trump kind helped accelerate this trend but is this generally good for the collective west?
I don't feel anything yet because these efforts rarely go anywhere. The average person makes decisions on a multitude of factors but price, availability and convenience are the most important.
However, if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate. Considering how our trade is structured, Europe would experience a lot more pain.
In other words, I think it's cool that you raise visibility to your products. I think you should do it. But you'll lose more than we will if this gets too serious at America's expense.
Optimally we should all develop specialities and maintain a local reserve in most key industries. But all out of war isn't in our interest.
It's pretty dumb! I want the best software and the best hardware, no matter where it's made. Outside of extremely niche situations (e.g. military hardware) international trade is a positive good for all those involved. If you sleep on mattress from China, wear clothes from Vietnam, drink coffee from Ethiopia, eat food from Mexico, and use software from the United States, everyone involved in all of those countries wins: you win because you get the best product, and the companies win because they are financially rewarded for making the best product -- not for their postal address. C'mon people, this is basic economics.
> How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?
Mutt here. It’s annoying how feckless the European pushback is. Half of these alternatives either run significant rails through America or are insignificantly small. Meanwhile, our ambassador to Greece is busy selling her sugar daddy’s natural gas to Albania and Bulgaria [1]. (Nobody is even pretending the folks buying her corruption will be prosecuted. Athens held up Russian sanctions to get one of their tycoons a carve-out.)
Sure got more visible the recent years but the "trend" isn't new.
When sensitive data was a topic even 15 years ago we built European only solutions because America and it's barely existing privacy laws were not to trust. (Built software for government, universities and other companies back then)
From my POV this has nothing to do with orange guy but it's an ongoing trend of benefiting from our customer and data protection laws.
Google's, Apple's, and Microsoft's profit first attitude has garnered the same resentment in Europe that they enjoy in the US. There's nothing surprising here. What will be surprising is if the push to move away works in Europe, where it hasn't worked in the US, so far.
I think you're attributing Big Tech's bad behavior to politicians where you should be attributing politicians' bad behavior to Big Tech's lobbying.
That doesn't make sense. If the "profit-first" attitude of the company problem, why is booking.com, with it's non-existent fraud-prevention and useless support, recommended as an alternative to Airbnb?
Because it's assumed that booking.com isn't hosted in the US where privacy and data protection laws are looser. Does that make sense?
You can also read the website. It lists reasons why people should move. No mention of Donald Trump.
That makes perfect sense. Half of Europeans vote right, just like Americans. There's no need for injecting super villains and otherism into the conversation.
I wish the guy motivating this didn't exist, but I would love for Europe to develop genuinely competitive software products. I don't think it's good even for us Americans that so much software is developed by an American monoculture; we benefit greatly from the existence of Ikea and Toyota.
It's a shame you guys can't benefit from Chinese auto competition. Here in the Philippines there are great choices from BYD, Geely, Chery, GWM, MG, and probably more I'm forgetting. Even the big legacy brands here have had to lower prices to compete.
Huh. I haven't seen that to be the case. But I suppose you can put whatever you like in arrow brackets and it might execute in some people's brains like it does in the browser.
European alternatives - mostly shit produced in China with different badge when it comes to physical stuff. The rest is digital services with userbase smaller than the dev team. It is actually good demonstration how pathetic our production capacity has become. And the industries where we actually punch quite well - Henkel, VSM, Tyrolit are missing.
And lets not with Coca Cola alternatives. It is the funniest joke of the year so far.
It's a little weird in some places.
Snickers for example shows first "Alprose" which I never heard, it's a small company that's not even common IN Switzerland. It lists Julius mainl which if it does chocolate its far from their actual business. And half of the other companies also seem regional niche stuff.
Dunno but gives a very vibe coded vibe
I can not comment on the vibe coded issue or not, but the name Alprose is not really a surprising name at all.
Alps are "Die Alpen" in german, and rose is rose too. So, a rose or a flower in a mountaineous area. It kind of fits to Switzerland.
Renaming operations are often strange: for instance, the name Raider before it then became Twix. I always found the renaming part peculiar; guess Twix is easier to market than Raider but both names are strange to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twix
I could also swear that Raider tasted better than Twix, but this could be to my aging cells no longer being as performant as they once were. Or they changed the recipe to the worse.
Having said that, I guess that website was AI slop generated, so no wonder it has low quality. I try to avoid AI in general, in particular the low quality slops; sadly youtube is being infected with it, I can no longer watch shorts - so many are just AI spam nowadays.
Do all the Europeans not know that HN is an American website?
Why are you guys all still here?
I tried submitting Pirsch.io, but there is a CORS error for OPTIONS https://db.buy-european.net/api/collections/suggestions/reco... -> 403 CORS missing allowed origin...
Finally found the European alternative to Salesforce: SAP!
I don't think anyone review these. How come Ducati is an alternative to Xiaomi?
[delayed]
Proud european here, I like the idea! Would be nice to have it translated in all european languages, and btw clicking on german doesn't work...
These days the latest trend is to vibe code Adobe and MS alternatives from scratch and they are pretty good, Europe has a golden chance of dropping US software vendors.
Apparently EU bureaucrats think that the MS office alternatives are shitty[0], well they can just tell an AI agent whats shitty and get it fixed.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/european-commission-staff-really-dislike...
"Element Pro" is not Open Source. Nor does it even come from the EU. From the outside it's incomprehensible anyone in EU bureaucracy would want something like this, given that there are good OS alternatives.
Programming languages and OS alternatives still missing from the list.
Any open source software should be considered "international" and there are a lot of European contributions to that universe.
The topic of "European" programming languages is highly interesting in the sense that there were a lot of highly developments done in Europe, but they are often less noticed than the counterparts popular in the US. The reason to look more into them would not be so much today's independence, but more to resurrect good concepts that kind of got ignored by history.
There is the ISLisp standard, of course the treasure chest of languages and works boy Nikolas Wirth and so much more. Europe has many great universities, their creations usually are free.
Of course, you could call Python an European language and Go heavily draws from the Wirth's language family.
The big difference between ISO languages, which were more relevant during cold war days and the modern open source approach is who gets to contribute the code and where are those repos hosted.
Khronos and RISC-V now have locations outside US for a reason.
Ideally those are free and open source
That isn't enough, who pushes code and repos location is also relevant.
Are you proposing forks of existing languages but in gitlab, and only european can approve PRs? Or a new language and OS? How does that work in practice when open source is public and users can have VPNs?
How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?. Trump kind helped accelerate this trend but is this generally good for the collective west?
I don't feel anything yet because these efforts rarely go anywhere. The average person makes decisions on a multitude of factors but price, availability and convenience are the most important.
However, if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate. Considering how our trade is structured, Europe would experience a lot more pain.
In other words, I think it's cool that you raise visibility to your products. I think you should do it. But you'll lose more than we will if this gets too serious at America's expense.
Optimally we should all develop specialities and maintain a local reserve in most key industries. But all out of war isn't in our interest.
Retailiate FOR WHAT?
If you encourage people to replace our products for yours just because of origin, we will do the same.
[delayed]
It's pretty dumb! I want the best software and the best hardware, no matter where it's made. Outside of extremely niche situations (e.g. military hardware) international trade is a positive good for all those involved. If you sleep on mattress from China, wear clothes from Vietnam, drink coffee from Ethiopia, eat food from Mexico, and use software from the United States, everyone involved in all of those countries wins: you win because you get the best product, and the companies win because they are financially rewarded for making the best product -- not for their postal address. C'mon people, this is basic economics.
> How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?
Mutt here. It’s annoying how feckless the European pushback is. Half of these alternatives either run significant rails through America or are insignificantly small. Meanwhile, our ambassador to Greece is busy selling her sugar daddy’s natural gas to Albania and Bulgaria [1]. (Nobody is even pretending the folks buying her corruption will be prosecuted. Athens held up Russian sanctions to get one of their tycoons a carve-out.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/at-davos-kimberly-guilfo...
Sure got more visible the recent years but the "trend" isn't new.
When sensitive data was a topic even 15 years ago we built European only solutions because America and it's barely existing privacy laws were not to trust. (Built software for government, universities and other companies back then)
From my POV this has nothing to do with orange guy but it's an ongoing trend of benefiting from our customer and data protection laws.
It was always a thing, but Trump made it very clear that he doesn't consider anybody of the western world an ally. So the intensity is quite new.
It's a bit ironic to fight protectionism with consumer nationalism, but good from a consumer awareness perspective.
Google's, Apple's, and Microsoft's profit first attitude has garnered the same resentment in Europe that they enjoy in the US. There's nothing surprising here. What will be surprising is if the push to move away works in Europe, where it hasn't worked in the US, so far.
I think you're attributing Big Tech's bad behavior to politicians where you should be attributing politicians' bad behavior to Big Tech's lobbying.
That doesn't make sense. If the "profit-first" attitude of the company problem, why is booking.com, with it's non-existent fraud-prevention and useless support, recommended as an alternative to Airbnb?
Because it's assumed that booking.com isn't hosted in the US where privacy and data protection laws are looser. Does that make sense?
You can also read the website. It lists reasons why people should move. No mention of Donald Trump.
That makes perfect sense. Half of Europeans vote right, just like Americans. There's no need for injecting super villains and otherism into the conversation.
I wish the guy motivating this didn't exist, but I would love for Europe to develop genuinely competitive software products. I don't think it's good even for us Americans that so much software is developed by an American monoculture; we benefit greatly from the existence of Ikea and Toyota.
It's a shame you guys can't benefit from Chinese auto competition. Here in the Philippines there are great choices from BYD, Geely, Chery, GWM, MG, and probably more I'm forgetting. Even the big legacy brands here have had to lower prices to compete.
I believe that having an integrated global community (not just 'the west') is much better for humanity than regional isolationism.
But I don't blame any country for disassociating with the US. Not just because Trump is our president, but more so that we elected him, twice.
Half of Europeans vote right. Just like the US.
This is about privacy and annoying ads everywhere. Europeans hate Google for the same reasons we do. Is that so hard to believe?
People everywhere want the same things you do.
> Half of Europeans vote right.
<insert "European right-wing is actually further left than America's left wing" comment here>
Huh. I haven't seen that to be the case. But I suppose you can put whatever you like in arrow brackets and it might execute in some people's brains like it does in the browser.
I’d bet most of those comments are from self-hating American leftists.
I used mailbox.org briefly but was very heavily disappointed in it. Canceled my account and moved to Proton.
I'm still on fastmail because I use *@domain.name and Proton only supports a very limited number of emailaddresses, and only 3(!) domains. Sadly.
Why? I have been using mailbox.org for a few years and I am very happy with it.
Not OP, but the Proton UX / UI is far superior to Mailbox.org - which i personally find hard to navigate and disorganized...
European alternatives - mostly shit produced in China with different badge when it comes to physical stuff. The rest is digital services with userbase smaller than the dev team. It is actually good demonstration how pathetic our production capacity has become. And the industries where we actually punch quite well - Henkel, VSM, Tyrolit are missing.
And lets not with Coca Cola alternatives. It is the funniest joke of the year so far.
[flagged]