“We choose to go to the Moon” is the title of an address US President John F. Kennedy gave in 1962 – and he sparked a huge effort that convinced almost everyone in the USA of a goal worth working for. Europe needs a movement like that – for open source software and standards that are competitive, convincing, sustainable and long-living.
Europe’s IT is behind in many ways, Open Source IT is behind. Europe’s IT is depending on hardware from China and software from the US – no matter if locally installed, SaaS or in a cloud. Big projects like a European hyperscaler have failed, it seems impossible to create what military and big money acchieved in the USA.
Similar things happened before: It took until the 90ies until Europe’s space agency became competitive with US or Russian spaceflight (even though the Germans had been the first to build a space rocket), but projects like Airbus and ESA showed that overtaking the market leaders is possible. Today, we are facing similar problems again, but in IT (again a field where the Germans had been the first – Konrad Zuse).
Why is the US so far ahead? Well, IT development has been largely driven by military, 10% of the worlds yearly IT budget comes from US administration (that includes secret services). Yes, it was the Nazis that first built a space-capable rocket and the first modern computer, during war times. And it was NASA who did the moonshot and the DARPA that built the internet and set the standards, during the cold war. All of this was military-driven.
Today, Europe is completely dependent on third party’s good will, with fingers hovering over kill switches. But Europe has different values – as not only the huge success of the GDPR shows. That’s probably also why we are not a military superpower – which I always loved.
But how can we close up to the big five of GAFAM (Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft)? It seems much harder today –The complexity has grown enormously through the decades. And so did the expectations: When the first rockets reached for the stars, no one would have thought of Voyager I and II being available 30 years for commands on thin and slow connections. Yet they were started not much more than 30 years after the Nazi’s rockets.
Public administrations have to assure their documents from the 90ies can be read 30 years into the future. Sustainable, plannable and provable secure IT can only build on open source and open standards. Deep space has similar requirements. Imagine a colony ship. After all, earth is a space ship. And things got faster.
How can we build software, computers, even artificial intelligence that still runs smoothly and do their job 30 years into the future? How can we create long-living systems – can we? Is our economic system even able to build something that big and “long-living”? Do we have enough time?
Europe needs a JFK speech moment: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. But this time for sustainable, open, long-living and reliable IT.