Technological Sovereignty, FSF Raising Money, and Paleoenshittification

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 17, 2026

• Evaluating the EU Open Source Strategy: Strengths and Weaknesses

  A summary of my three-part analysis of the EU Open Source Strategy on Tagoross. Real strengths, real design flaws. The sovereignty definition does not fit open source. The legislation, CADA and Chips Act 2.0, encourages or stays silent rather than requires.

• New York Times ☛ The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)

  France and Germany want to quit relying on America and China for key technology like artificial intelligence, but they’re having to choose where to do it.

• FSF ☛ Fundraiser extended. Help us reach our goal and get an anti-surveillance cover

  96% of our funding comes from individuals just like you. Your generosity really matters. Your support runs the infrastructure for the GNU project. Your support maintains and enforces the GNU Public License (GPL), one of the world's most popular software licenses, and our Licensing and Compliance Lab is also the preeminent resource of free licensing information for free software developers. And your support helps us protect and expand user freedom across the world through our many campaigns and projects, including LibrePhone, Defective by Design, Fight to Repair, and LibreLocal.

• New York Times ☛ The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)

  The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China.

• Don Marti ☛ paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms

  Without that move by Sun, and other attempts at enshittification of Unix, the software freedom movement and open source software business might never have gone mainstream. So for those who dig rhyming history, it’s tempting to make the analogy: MyTerms and the tools that support it are to the enshittifying web of today as the GNU licenses and tools were to Unix. But the rhyme needs to hang together. The GNU tools were initially distributed first on tape, then CD, in a convenient form for building and installing on existing Unix systems. The “autotools” that mystify the developers of today were a pragmatic response to the need to work with what’s there in order to get adoption.