Why there’s no European Google?
142 points by ploum
142 points by ploum
I'm reminded of that EU search coalition which I haven't heard news from since it was announced, but apparently it's live.
This is also one of those things: this is kinda huge, if you stop to think about it. How on earth do these things stay below the radar but those for-profit US based initiatives become world famous? It can't just be advertising, can it really?
Woah I didn't know about that, I guess https://www.ecosia.org/ is now an independent search engine with its own index?
It also has "AI search" with a chatbot interface!
We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).
Well, I still would like to see a navigation app based on OpenStreetMap, which is as good as Google Maps. Here We Go is considered the European alternative, but it is not as reliable and lacks some convenient integrations. I don't see how Open Source could help here.
The biggest take is that it is impossible to have fine-grained traffic data like Google without having billions of spyware enabled smartphone on the road. You just cannot do it.
2. I would like to stop comparing solutions on a pure technical basis. "I would like to quite Google Thing but the open source solution I tried doesn’t have the shiny color I like"
There’s so many problems with that kind of answers.
Firstly, it means you value "shiny coloured featured" more than political independence and ethical value. That’s a huge problem. So, basically, you don’t want to change! You would only migrate to a perfect clone (and, guess what? even for a perfect clone, you would not do it because "the clone doesn’t add value)
Secondly: You are not even trying. When you try alternative such as Comaps, you discover that there are many many ways in which Google Maps sucks: ever tried planning bikepacking trips or walking treks with Google Maps? Ever used Google Maps in a forest? It sucks. Every solutions shines in a given context. Saying "but Google Maps is superior" is simply false. The fact that most people, including those in tech, cannot see it is a huge problem.
Thirdly: The whole point is to advocate for institutions to invest into Open Source. We don’t care that it is not perfect yet. Nobody cares that you still use Google Maps on a personal level. That’s not the point. The point is : how can we make alternatives that first allows to survive without monopolies. If those alternative get better than monopolies, well, that would be the cherry on the cake. But that’s not the goal!
Thank you for arguing clearly exactly what has been in my head for the longest time! You first and second points under "2." really drive home the underlying problems. Open source (or any European alternatives) are having to fight an uphill battle. The deck is stacked against them.
I also think it will stay that way, probably forever, because of how easy it is to build a product and become Really Big in the US: few pesky consumer laws to comply with, a single unified culture and language with many states to grow into and solidify the product, before expanding into the European market. And of course, a big pool of VC investor money to get yourself bootstrapped. All of these mean the competition from closed source US products is fierce. We cannot compete with them on sheer features, and where we can (as you point out with Comaps etc), we cannot compete on marketing. Because this also boils down to simple brand loyalty and awareness.
All of the above are also big reasons why I advocate for the EU to attack the problem on multiple fronts. Education on the impact of software choices being a very important pillar, and requiring by law that government institutions use open source software being another.
Otherwise, this pressure to stick with the status quo is too strong to overcome, even with the very best software alternatives. And even if the alternatives come, people will just jump ship the moment the next product with a "shiny new color" comes along.
impossible to have fine-grained traffic data like Google without having billions of spyware enabled smartphone on the road
One solution to this is to pass legislation that mandates Google/others share live traffic data via a public API at minimal or no cost. This could apply to other similarly useful kinds of data as well.
In Czechia, phone operators share anonymized phone locations with public transportation companies and urban planners so that those can figure out how to make the trips more efficient.
Firstly, it means you value "shiny coloured featured" more than political independence and ethical value. That’s a huge problem. So, basically, you don’t want to change! You would only migrate to a perfect clone (and, guess what? even for a perfect clone, you would not do it because "the clone doesn’t add value)
I think this is a very important part that I fail to completely reason about.
In any area where there is profit to be made, a commercial company will have a huge incentive to make a shiny and even truly very user-friendly product. They have money to spend wisely on a good user experience.
Most open source projects cannot compete- they simply won't have comparable resources.
Plus, they will invest in marketing.
I think you are right that many times, the open source will be superior in some senses. For example, just by virtue of not being oriented towards a profit, it can be better for the user.
But, esp. in software that benefits from network effects, you're not in a good position because simply most people do not care. And why would they? I only have bandwidth to care about a finite number of things- and the things I care about mostly gravitate around things I know. I do not expect most people to care about which instant messaging platform to use!
And honestly, for example, in instant messaging, the popular choice comes and goes- we've been in a long stretch of WhatsApp dominance in many places, but the leader has nearly always been a proprietary IM platform. So WhatsApp will die and be replaced with something else, people will move their chats to the new shiny, and move on. While we the nerds appreciate that it would have been great if XMPP would have won in the early 2000s and had evolved through these days, it's hard to articulate to people who do not care about instant messaging about what basically they'll be using for a number of years and then change...
Maybe the answer is governments. I agree with what someone else said in the thread- just trying to be independent of the US does not seem like a good motivator for me. I think we just need to realize that some services are mandatory for modern life, and large companies should not be able to control them.
I mean, we could insist on standards for mass email providers. Even limit their bundling options, move to a similar model we have for mobile operators... even advance the standard to enable address e.g. portability.
And IM providers could be forced to agree on a set of live standards they will follow to enable interoperability and again, account portability.
We managed with phone numbers, so...
It's a policy choice. Either we allow private roads that can only be used with road owner rental vehicles or we force everyone to be compatible.
if XMPP [...] had evolved through these days
The federated XMPP/Jabber network has not won in terms of market share, but it sure has evolved and is still doing so. I am taking the train tomorrow to go the XMPP Summit 26, (some of) my family members and friends have been using Conversations and Monal for several years, so I would know. ;-)
Yes, it's moving forward, but their objectives don't really align with mine. I would like to set fire to WhatsApp and use any IM system that allows for third-party clients without encumbrances.
I decided to play again with XMPP very recently to see where it was at, esp. because I had played with Delta Chat and I was very impressed with that.
So I went with Conversations, that has the nicest onboarding I've ever seen for an XMPP client. (Slightly inferior to Delta Chat, but good enough.) But nowadays, even non-technical people expect to be able to join their IM to their computer.
Which should precisely be the forte of XMPP!
However, in WhatsApp (and Delta Chat, Telegram, Signal...) the mobile app guides you through this process, but I found no guide on Conversations to do this. Which means, if I recommend XMPP/Conversations to people I know, they'll likely won't be able to figure this out on their own.
(I filed a bug. Someone said this was not something that Conversations should do. It's still not closed, but it's been idle for over a month...)
I use Gajim on my Linuxes, so does my wife on her Windows, I used to use Beagle on my mac work laptop, I am not sure what you mean? You have to type a username@server and password, and that's it. There are also web clients like movim or converse. Maybe you mean the "flash this QR on your phone to login" flow? I believe Fast Authentication Streamlining Tokens could be used as a building block for such feature, but this is really outside my "expertise".
nowadays, even non-technical people expect to be able to join their IM to their computer.
I was surprised to realize this, but among friends and family that have migrated -some- of their comms to XMPP, most do not care the slightest about using it outside their phone. I contributed some stuff to Gajim and would have been pleased to get some of my friends to use it, but the answer was 99% of the time: "oh no, I don't want messages on my computer, that's what the phone is for". The "nowadays" is what surprises me most about your sentence, I'm old enough to remember my non-technical friends using MSN Messenger on their 1024×768 CRT monitors, but "nowadays" they just want to use their phone.
in WhatsApp (and Delta Chat, Telegram, Signal...)
Delta Chat and Telegram have proper non-mobile clients indeed, but for Signal and WhatsApp, the mobile client is the "main device" and the desktop/web client is a second-class citizen. Close the app on your phone and it will eventually stop working until you start the app again (and in the case of WhatsApp, you'll have to re-auth, using your phone).
their objectives don't really align with mine
Unlike any other alternatives you mentioned, there is no such thing as "their" objectives. The Conversations maintainer has his own objectives, sure, but XMPP has a democratic process for the protocol development. You don't even have to be involved in this process to just start building stuff that uses the protocol. It is a common good. If you want to get involved, it can just be participating in mailing lists and/or chat rooms. Relevant recent thread in the mailing list: Participation of civil society in the standardization process. Come back and let's "set fire to WhatsApp" together. :-)
I mean any process where someone follows the onboarding in Conversations, then taps on "add a device", and they get a client on a different device. I don't care the process as long as it's straightforward and it offers a "golden path" that works.
Then I can recommend people "get Conversations and follow the instructions to do a second device".
I'm all for there being choice, for a XEP standardizing the QRs, but there must be a clear simple process for people who want to do things without having to do research.
You might be right in that many, perhaps most, just care about having their IM on their phone, but I meet enough people who use a second device that for me it's one of the clearest obstacles for me to recommend XMPP. (In contrast, Delta Chat works and provides everything I need to recommend it.)
I know it's open source, and I like the idea of XMPP. But I need a mobile client to recommend that has a good onboarding that doesn't require research, including a second device. Conversations seems to be the closest (although the costs on the Play Store are a turn-off for me, although I understand it's likely needed), so that's why I filed the bug- because the more decent options available, the better. At the moment, Delta Chat ticks my boxes better- I hope some XMPP combo does too at some point.
Maybe we can learn from XMPP not winning the IM world at the time. And from email being more and more centralized. And for the web itself (which is now gatekeeped by two browsers).
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I think there's another lesson to be learned. Beyond user experience and marketing, private companies trying to dominate a market will collaborate with existing open standards etc. exactly as long as it benefits them. But not a second longer.
So yes, Meta's Threads is supposed to federate with ActivityPub. No one should base any decision on that, because if (when) Threads achieves sufficient marketshare, ActivityPub will disappear.
I use ActivityPub and I refuse to engage with BlueSky or Threads, because it's a trap.
However, a lot of people on ActivityPub- even those who are escaping from proprietary networks and aware of their tactics, will still engage and feed BlueSky and Threads.
I don't disagree with you here, but I wonder if it answers the right question?
The question is not if the EU should invest more into political independence or its values. The question is how. Why should the EU rather invest into OSS than into proprietary EU companies?
Also, I would assume they hope for details. Like, should the EU invest more into the OSS social media or OSS operating systems or OSS smartphones or ...?
The most important question though, since this is a "call for evidence": What is the evidence that such investments will pay off (quickly and bigly)?
Your article is a well-written call for action. When I look at this call for evidence, specifically the section "Consultation strategy", I don't think it addresses their questions.
Coming back to the example of a "map app": It is probably not hard to find evidence how OSM has made mapping data cheaper and easily available without downsides if you get the data from Google. Would investing a few more millions there be a good investment? How would it pay off? Probably not in the navigation business because "it is impossible to have fine-grained traffic data like Google without having billions of spyware enabled smartphone on the road".
Maybe there is something else related to OSM? The data is already great and while maintenance is important, what could there be as a next big step? Thousands of municipalities in the EU deal with mapping data. Maybe OSM could help there and save billions of tax money within ten years? I don't know and neither does the EU commission.
OSM has severe limitations for building a modern mapping data model, ignoring the well-known data license and graffiti issues for the moment.
It is impossible to use human crowdsourcing to detect and process the number of changes per day that actually occur in cutting edge mapping data models. Even with fully automated pipelines processing petabytes of real-time telemetry per day, it is generally recognized that there are still large gaps in accuracy and freshness that limit usability for many applications. The large closed source mapping data models only use the OSM data model for parallel construction, cueing their systems to look for potential changes they can find in other data sources.
This is the crux of the matter. Maps are no longer slowly changing display artifacts created by humans. Today, they are real-time petabyte-to-exabyte scale data models that are being continuously updated from data flowing in at rates most software devs can barely imagine. The data informing the data model is often noisy, erroneous, corrupted, or manipulated so you need sophisticated and compute-intensive inference pipelines to clean this up. Put this way, it is obvious why Google is so much better at this than the traditional mapping companies.
There is a large opportunity here. Industry has an enormous desire for a competitive non-Google map infrastructure, so if the EU were to build one it would be immediately relevant globally. The large caveat is that it is impossible to build a state-of-the-art map infrastructure on current OSS. Creating it is a commitment to building a completely bespoke data infrastructure with a lot of computer science that is not in the literature. The reason this doesn't already exist isn't because many companies have not tried to build it, it is because it requires extreme technical sophistication to have a prayer of implementing it successfully.
The barrier to an MVP in mapping is very, very high and there is no way to get around that fact. In principle the EU could acquire the necessary data sources to build these data models, that isn't the real limitation.
It is impossible to use human crowdsourcing to detect and process the number of changes per day that actually occur in cutting edge mapping data models
My house showed up on OSM as under construction when the work started. When I moved in, OSM showed the building and had the unfinished half of the estate marked as under construction. It took Google Maps over a year to notice that the estate existed.
Some roads around here became one-way streets a while ago. Again, OSM had up-to-date data within a week. It took Google Maps and the major SatNav systems over a year to stop sending people down the roads.
One of the roads nearby was being used as a cut through so they put a barrier in the middle and turned it into two dead ends. OSM had that marked before the construction work finished. I helped some folks who were struggling to turn around towing a caravan a few months later. Why had they gone down a dead-end street? Because Google Maps had told them to.
So, while I agree that updating maps is hard, I have seen plenty of evidence that OSM is better at it than proprietary map data sets.
I guess it's locality-dependent. Waze (which I assume shares data with Google Maps) picked up newly constructed roundabouts around here 6 months or so before they were added to Open Street Map.
Ultimately someone has to sit down and edit OSM, and if the people who know how to edit it aren't evenly distributed then some places will lag behind.
Ultimately someone has to sit down and edit OSM, and if the people who know how to edit it aren't evenly distributed then some places will lag behind.
The same thing is true for Google Maps, and it's much harder to scale a thing where a single company has to maintain the data thna it is a distributed environment.
In Cambridge, the University of Cambridge used to maintain their own maps. These were very detailed for university / college sites, but also needed to be kept up to date for surrounding roads because they were used to show people how to get to various university places. Once OSM reached a certain level of quality, they realised it was cheaper to contribute their map data to OSM than maintain their own, so they wrote an OSM renderer that matched their old style and switched over. They still have people updating the areas in and around university sites, but now other people mostly handle the rest of the city. Everyone wins. With Google, you can put in requests for them to add / fix things in the maps, but they can't easily do the things like footpaths inside colleges because they're private property. And you can't then use their data for all purposes, you need to have a legal agreement to use them for any commercial purpose and using them also comes with a load of GDPR obligations.
It's quite possible that the mapping of hiking and biking trails is better in OSM than Google for where I live. I think there's a certain disunion between people who commute regularly by car - thus providing input to Waze/Google - and those that hike and bike who might be more familiar with navigation aids that rely more on OSM.
Possibly. But when travelling I've found that there's a very sharp drop off in Google Maps quality when you get out of populous areas. My mother lives in rural France and Google maps doesn't have half the roads near here, whereas OSM has them with metadata about the kind of road, and also has a load of the walking paths and most of the buildings marked. In the middle of Paris, Google Maps data is quite good.
The quality and freshness of all base maps vary widely based on where you are. OSM is good in some areas but is much more uneven globally than the closed source base maps.
There are only about half a dozen global base maps, of which OSM is one. Every company that builds a base map regularly compares their coverage and quality against their competitors. All of the base maps, including Google, have regions where they perform well and areas where they perform poorly.
No current base map is a clear winner globally. Beyond requiring more consistent access to data globally, it requires technical infrastructure at a scale that OSM and most closed source base maps will never be able to build.
It is impossible to use human crowdsourcing to detect and process the number of changes per day that actually occur in cutting edge mapping data models
I'm ready to believe that, but the fact is OSM is very often more right than Google Maps here in Belgium, a country that should have more than enough data available to display a 120 km/h speed limit on highways instead of the random 90, 110 and even 130 (that exists nowhere in Belgium) limits that Google Maps often shows.
After years of taking my own street the right way, Google Maps still doesn't know that that street goes that way. And I do use Google Maps, and so do probably a sizeable amount of the cars that travel through that street every day. It's not a low-traffic road.
It's probably different in other places. But in Belgium and France at least, when I want to be sure the data on my map is correct, I use OpenStreetMap. The rest of the time I use Google Maps for traffic information.
The reason this doesn't already exist isn't because many companies have not tried to build it, it is because it requires extreme technical sophistication to have a prayer of implementing it successfully.
I disagree. The reason it hasn't been built is because there is no straightforward way to pay for it.
This is the kind of unprofitable baseline infrastructural thing that is absolutely the bailiwick of government. Sure, the government won't do a great job, but it can provide a publicly accessible baseline that decreases the entry cost of other people building on it.
To be competitive, the base map needs to be consistent and global. Many governments, including those in Europe, actively resist the notion of giving their mapping data to an organization not based in their country. To the extent they are willing to pool their data in a common system, most want absolute veto power over any mapping edits that concerns their country in that system. The intransigence of governments on these issues has been a major roadblock despite many efforts to build a common base map.
It would be great to have a global base map operated as a public utility. Most companies and people would prefer that. The base maps that we have now are a reaction to governments being unwilling to participate in a public map, but most heavy users of them recognize that they are not really fit for modern use cases. Perhaps ironically, the US government is by far one of the friendliest to this idea and always has been.
The direction the industry has been headed is the creation of a new commercial mapping entity that is deemed sufficiently neutral by design that all the major tech companies (except Google) are okay with them controlling the One True Map. There are plenty of ways for this to be paid for, that isn't a material issue.
Maps are no longer slowly changing display artifacts created by humans.
This is true, and true of more than just maps.
I've worked at a few health care companies, for example, and payment in that world is generally based on a combination of factors like name, billing address, license ID number, etc. But when I last worked in the industry, the measured half-life of that data was 18 months.
Meaning, if you compiled a list of all the doctors, hospitals, etc. you have a payment relationship with, and their names, addresses, license numbers, etc., then 18 months later half of them would have changed in ways that invalidate your data set. Which is a huge source of unnecessary friction and anger, since to the patient "it's just Dr. Smith, the same Dr. Smith I've been going to for years!" but in that time Dr. Smith has, for payment purposes, operated under four or five different names, used half a dozen different billing addresses... and so, no, the payment systems can't just automatically verify that "it's still Dr. Smith".
I travel a lot in the UK and Europe and I use Organic Maps (OSM), google maps and CityMapper. OSM has always been at least as good for road maps and always better for walking and pedestrian paths (often much much better).
I use CityMapper and Google maps for turn-by-turn directions, and google maps for finding restaurants (OSM has pretty out of date info on restaurants and businesses, in my experience)
My article is a translation from an old article and I agree that it doesn’t really answer the call for evidence.
And the main reason is that I believe the very first thing we need to do is to shift our priorities. To change our very definition of success. As long as we play by US-monopolies rules, we will not be able to make anything but sub-par cheap clones. It simply cannot work that way. Even if it start to work, it will be easily subverted (see my history of the Nokia Meego debacle)
Well, I still would like to see a navigation app based on OpenStreetMap, which is as good as Google Maps
I use Organic Maps on my phone and, unlike Google Maps it:
It doesn't have live traffic data, but it also isn't connected to a massive surveillance system that it uses to build the traffic data so I consider that a win overall.
mapy.cz (now, mapy.com) is one of these I believe.
They are in extremely common use in Czechia, much more common than Google because Google Maps seems to have a difficult time mapping and pathfinding in Czechia.
I was recommended this because I wanted to cycle to work.
(I also learned that “cycling to work” means totally different things to Scandinavians and Czech people).
(I also learned that “cycling to work” means totally different things to Scandinavians and Czech people).
Scandinavian here, in what way are the terms different?
"Cykla till jobbet" means taking a bicycle to your workplace in Swedish.
I can't describe it so maybe it helps a bit with a visual difference (note: I used London and NL, but the difference is core to what I mean).
Cyclist (cycling to work) for Czech people: https://standfirst-thecriticmag-production.imgix.net/uploads/2025/07/feature-milibank-lycra-cyclist.jpg?fit=crop&crop=faces,entropy&q=40&auto=compress,format&w=956&h=1438
Cyclist (cycling to work) for Scandiavians: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/utrechtsummer2014-04.jpg
LOL in Stockholm every cyclist basically looks like pic nr 1.
If someone rode around with a kid who was not wearing a helmet and not securely strapped into a child seat on the rear, they'd probably be arrested.
Oh, I live in Malmö- people in the first picture basically don’t exist.
To be fair with you, the few dozen times I have been to Stockholm it didn’t strike me as a very friendly place to cycle, and I didn’t see many cyclists. But the ones I did see didn’t see to stand out as being especially spandex laden with clip-ins.
I don’t think I even saw a helmet, but; your experience likely trumps mine as I’ve only lived in Sweden for 11 years and most of that was spent in Malmö.
Stockholm is significantly more bike-hostile than probably any other city in Sweden. Maybe Göteborg beats it?
I would never bike without a helmet. I know of too many people who have been seriously injured or killed when biking.
I will not let this random dunk and affront to my city of residence to stand unchallenged. GBG cyclist here, both for leisure and work commuting. The road traffic is kind of random with lane changes and trams and all, but the proportion of a'holes and psychos at the wheel is not higher than elsewhere.
I figured there would be even more salt-of-the-earth Volvo car builders and owners there, than the Beemer and Merc drivers up here. Not saying they're any less assholish about cyclists, though.
I would never bike without a helmet. I know of too many people who have been seriously injured or killed when biking.
That begs the question of whether or not helmets significantly reduce serious injuries and death on net. Obviously, all other things being equal it’s not worse to have a helmet on than to be bareheaded when struck on the head. But the helmet can not be effective at all in certain head strikes (e.g. when struck by a bullet or fast vehicle). And of course it is not effective if not hit on the head: helmets do nothing against hand, wrist and forearm injuries.
Helmets are not costless, either. Besides the actual cost, they make cycling less spontaneous and more inconvenient (one has to lug the helmet around after parking the bike). The number-one threat to cyclists is not themselves but drivers: studies have shown that cyclist safety increases with the number of cyclists on the road: by decreasing the number of cyclists, helmets reduce safety. Worse, other studies have shown that drives drive more closely to helmeted cyclists, increasing the risk of collisions. So helmets lead to drivers less familiar with cyclists, and more prone to driving dangerously close.
I believe it is true that helmets on net are bad for individuals, bad for cycling and bad for society. I don’t believe that they should be banned, but I definitely don’t believe that they should be encouraged or mandated.
For other readers, this isn't just one person's opinion. Several influential cycling campaign group hold similar positions, e.g. Cycling UK recommends that helmets should not be promoted.
I think using a helmet is a deterrent to cycling for a bunch of reasons:
Personally, I cycle without a helmet unless I am going on a long cycling holiday, then I sometimes wear one because I am more likely to be cycling in poor conditions and on steep roads.
I think data on hire-bike users pretty clearly suggests that helmets are not necessary for cycling in cities.
If you want more rationale for not mandating helmets, I recommend Ruwen Ogien's works, a French philosopher who strongly advocated against any laws meant to prevent self-inflicted harm or risks (while at the same time absolutely not being a "libertarian" in the US sense). I don't know how many of his books have been translated in English though.
Back to the subject, I do think it's more reasonable to wear a helmet, but I generally agree with Ogien's "minimal ethics" and don't think mandating them would count as "progress".
But the helmet can not be effective at all in certain head strikes (e.g. when struck by a bullet or fast vehicle).
Your bicycling environment sounds much more challenging than mine, to be honest.
Yeah that second picture is from the Netherlands (it even says NL on it and in the URL). Perfectly normal here, even though there's heavy campaigning from the government to try and change things...
The point was to show the difference, because the dutch way and the british way are wildly different and its easier to find pictures of those.
Sorry for not taking first hand photos to illustrate the point.
Appreciate the pictures but how did you mix up the countries so badly? LOL. The first one is from London. The second is from NL. But thanks for the pics.
You should probably read the bit of my comment where I explicitly mention that these are london and netherlands.
The point was to illustrate the difference, not to specifically show a Czech cyclist (they are somewhat rare) and a Copenhagen/Malmö cyclist (common, but they just look the same as the dutch photo and sourcing photos is more difficult).
Munich has both, I'd say - although pic1 would more be "full bike touring kit (rain gear or leggings+gloves+rainjacket/jersey) on a touring bike with panniers" instead of spandex. And I'm kinda equating p1 because it's specialized cycling kit, just not the performance aspect :P
(Me, I'm probably in between. If the weather is bad I'll use different pants than I'm wearing in the office and because I own rain gear and panniers, I'll use that if needed - but you'd 90% see me commuting in normal clothes and a backpack on a reasonable bike with fenders)
Not only for cycling, but also for hiking. I have never been disappointed by a hiking route suggested by Mapy.cz. It's much better than Komoot because mapy.cz can suggest a hiking route based on your current position and the distance you want to hike. However, the app tends to crash frequently and some time (years?) ago they started advertising premium features.
Have you tried OsmAnd (developed by OsmAnd BV in the Netherlands, fully open source)? I have been using it for years, and they also have a very nice funding model: If you download from F-Droid, you get all the features, but if you download from Google Play or the iOS App Store, some non-essential functionalities are in-app-purchases, e.g. unlimited offline map packs.
Yes, you can download the entire world as an offline map, if you wanted. Device storage has become so large, there is little reason not to download your entire home country or state. More than once have I found myself in the forest with no cell reception with friends, who then struggled to navigate on their always-online apps. In contrast, OsmAnd just worked for me. It has dozens of modes (walking, bike, car, airplane, etc.).
Many weaknesses have been resolved in recent years, including sometimes choppy map rendering and slow route calculation. Given the excellent OSM data, you get lane-level navigation hints, which Apple Maps and Google Maps often get wrong.
I found OsmAnd to be super clunky on iOS, and I didn't love the style in which the maps were rendered. I've heard it's a better experience on Android. If you say the choppy rendering has improved, maybe I'll try it again.
I personally like Organic Maps – also open source, Estonian. Also has offline maps.
Haven't used navigation very much in either of them, TBH. When on foot, I usually need public transit timetable, and when driving, I prefer a dedicated device over a phone app (and want some live traffic info). When my TomTom broke I tried a bunch of apps, it seemed like none of them was designed by somebody who ever drove a car, Google Maps was the absolute worst. I could go on a rant here.
Also, navigation apps could be so much better, I'd love to have an open source, hackable thing on my dashboard. The bottleneck for really nice features seems to be data access (live traffic info, live public transit status; I've never seen it, but I'd love a map/navi that would utilize live weather info ("Heads up: you're about to drive into a thunderstorm" type alerts or a wind indicator on a navi screen would be great))
Really good points, thanks! Yes, weather info would be great. Public transit is in beta at OsmAnd and I tested it successfully in Prague a few weeks ago. Apart from that, I really like Öffi, but they are fighting an uphill battle as more and more public transport companies close their APIs and force their shoddy apps on everybody.
I tried OsmAnd a few years ago and it was complete garbage. Happy to report it is much faster now and has gained many useful features.
That said, it's a loooong way off from the usability and performance of Google Maps. This is not something regular consumers are going to consider using. Which is a shame, because OSM data is really good.
GMaps does have an offline mode :)
Of course you need to download the map before.
What worries me more is that you don't get GPS coordinates from GMaps if you
didn't download the area you are in.
Granted, but the offline mode in Google Maps is really primitive in comparison. I can download a complete map of Germany or even Europe and it only takes a few GBs of space, which is nothing in many of today's smartphones. And no matter where you place me, it would just be there. There is also a world overview map with coarse roads and large cities.
I used it years ago. It is a nice app to work with OSM data.
It seems it does not show/use traffic information. Beyond that, Google Maps offers all the additional information about shops and restaurants (opening times, menus, etc).
You can download Google live traffic data as an overlay, but it's not (yet) included in the routing. It may sound like a cope, but it gives me an incentive not to turn my brain off when navigated.
Regarding opening hours, Google of course is king, but at least here in Germany and larger european cities, this data is pretty up to date, too, though nothing beats businesses proactively updating their times for Google.
You won’t have that because Google has put the data sharing app in all android phones and AFAIK you can’t opt out.
It’s part of the reason Apple and Google are able to do live traffic reporting. Android phones in cars do data reporting, without the consent of the driver and on aggregate is the most accurate “live view” system we have.
The irony is a huge percentage of contributions to the Linux kernel comes from employees at Google, Intel, Red Hat, MS etc While true Linux and git are highlighted as European triumphs, these projects are now heavily sustained by American corporations. Without the American profit motive, many of these open-source tools might lack the resources to remain cutting-edge
There's two types of contributors to open-source, vocational and mercenary. Linux exists because of the former, but it is successful in an enterprise setting mostly because of the later, who get paid by companies to solve current problems they meet, which are most of the times not the same problems that individual desktop linux users have.
Personally I would probably not miss if facebook and google would stop contributing, and most likely neither would you because the vocational contributors, that do it because they want to fix an issue they had would still be there.
Agree. If 80% of the work on an important product is done by engineers from the US, the product will develop in a way that benefits the US market. The lack of a "European Google" means that Europe has no big players who could promote European interests in security, privacy, and standards in these shared projects. We all use the same forest, but the trees are planted according to an American landscape design. If Europe relies only on volunteers, it will remain a consumer of other people’s standards. To have real digital sovereignty, Europe needs its own "mercenaries" professionals paid in euros, who will promote our values (privacy, openness) in the code that the whole world uses
I think an added complication is that many Europeans (say they) don't care about privacy or openness. Sure, occasionally there's a big backlash when some shitstorm hits but then everyone forgets and goes back to their convenient American tools again. Expediency and convenience often trumps values for people.
I suspect the only way this will really start to stick is when Europeans start having an intense distaste for the USA as a country (like they do for example for Russia or China), instead of seeing it as this fantastic "freedom land of opportunities" as it literally has been since the start. The cracks are starting to show now, so hopefully a few more years of the current administration and a few successors with similar ruthless foreign policies will cement this type of distrust.
You can already see it happening with apps popping up that allow you to scan products in the supermarket to determine their producer's origins.
Perhaps once people will start to "shop local", Europe can grow its digital economy and some too big to ignore players will come about here. At the same time, I worry about that. Those big companies are almost never good for users. For instance, SAP is a big German company (not open source, but still it's European) and it's been implicated in bribery scandals. And Spotify is also European, but hardly loved amongst smaller artists.
You’ve hit the nail on the head regarding the privacy paradox, because we talk like activists but act like consumers. However, relying on a "distrust of the USA" as a primary driver for European tech is a dangerous game. Negative motivation rarely builds great products, but positive vision does
Negative motivation rarely builds great products, but positive vision does.
I agree, but I don't think that's a problem here: if US products simply are not considered by consumers, there's still enough room for EU-based companies to try and out-compete each other, leading to better products.
Well, personally I'm in the vocational camp, but I would love to see a EU level framework for paying open-source developers.
I'm currently working on stuff under a commons grant from NLNet, so at a very small amplitude this already exists.
I would also add Blender to the list of technology projects that have had a bigger positive impact on people's lives than most big-tech unicorns.
It a sign of American social pathology that it allows and give so much power to psychopaths likes of Musk, Karp or Ellison among many others.
As someone who moved from Canada to the UK (just prior to Brexit; ~2013) one of the things that always struck me compared to Canada was the lack of incentives for people starting up products like something like Google, or even just a smaller app or SaaS. Back in Canada there were clear grants, funding, networks you could join, and they were more generally available with less caveats, which meant there was a higher opportunity for upward mobility (not just socially, but from a business perspective). We need to create incentives that are universally available to people in order to innovate and create products that meet the EU markets demands. Those incentives are either hidden away, or lip service where they're only available to those that already have the money. The EU is historically risk-averse, preferring a even keel, but that means that maybe it shies away from riskier endeavours with perceived limited growth (not global, EU focused).
European oriented doesn't necessarily mean it has to be open source, just seeing more European business firmly rooted in the EU and UK would be great to see, but having run a small software shop in the UK, the sizeable amount of money and connection you need to have in order to get over the "hump" where you begin to have capital to expend on marketing is more of a mountain than a mole-hill. In the U.S. there are paths to "minimizing cost" which violate labour laws here in the UK and EU which mean you can get to market faster at lower cost by sacrificing your peoples well being. Our labour laws make that harder (which is good!), but the downside is that things take more time, and require more of a runway in terms of funds to take off which is hard if you're not already well connected or reasonably well off.
Upward mobility is definitely better in Canada, and used to be fairly good in the US (not sure if it still is). Upward mobility in places like the UK and parts of the EU may be cordoned off to people who are already up there. Around where I live there are clear class-based divides entrenched into society which means there are heavy biases towards people who are clearly already well-connected and well-off in general. Even getting a business bank account here was hard for a small business, and grants were basically non-existent to help grow a business centered around tech. I have had a loads of projects that I could have commercialized within the UK and EU over the years, but at a certain point i've always stopped, because the incentives to carry on, just weren't there...
Upward mobility is definitely better in Canada
Which data did you use to determine this? Because Canada ranks below a lot of European countries in the Global Social Mobility Index.
The experience of running a company in both countries is where it came from. Just to qualify that, this was between 2010-2016 where I moved to UK in 2013. In Canada it felt like there was clearer information, avenues and places to find things like business grants and support services either from the government or institutions. Here in the UK, these things were either so tightly scoped to a specific niche inside of an industry or just non existent at the time I was starting the company here in the U.K. part of this may have been because I wasn’t born here in hindsight? So a large class of things were walled off maybe?
My point may have gotten muddled up from the way I phrased it but what I was trying to say was that upward mobility from the perspective of starting a business is extremely difficult in the U.K. there are a lot of barriers to getting over a significant hump where you need capital to really get traction.
This is unlikely to be the answer because there is no Canadian google either, nor was google itself started with one of those grants.
One of the reasons might have been that Gopher’s creators wanted to keep their rights to it and license any related software
I'd never heard this before. Looking up more about this, I found it's even more ironic than I expected; the licensing fees were not coming from some tech startup but from a publicly-funded university! How incredibly american of a way to fuck things up.
Other examples that come to mind:
For me the question is "why there's no Finnish Google"? :)
(and I'm certain I'm forgetting something)
None of those started as (and mostly remain not) profit-seeking entities. Perhaps Finland has the brains but not the necessary business climate?
The article negates itself. I share the mindset of admiring and perceive value in what we chose to admire. This is a daily reality right in front of us that we sometimes fail to recognize.
HOWEVER, one cannot gloss over hard evidence just under a mega-wide brush of relativism. The fact is: google has been tremendously useful wife it's inception. Same goes for Netflix, amazon, Facebook... People use these products because they address a specific need they have. Let's not shut down the discussion by trying to get on a moral high horse of not being greedy. Sure extreme business with destructive practices should be question, but not everyone in business world is an evil money obsessed maniac. Plenty of people and companies embody their mission of providing something of value to society.
I think Europe's problem is that it is way too obsessed in trying to prove that it is moral superior. To the point that it makes whole industries inviable. Such as IT to a great extent. Companies try to set up in Europe... Taxation is sky High, labour is expensive. Rules and beaourocracy are relentlessly brutal. The question becomes: why would you even expect something like an European google to exist?
Migrated off Proton partly due to this. Found I was able to replace the parts I used with subscriptions to individual services for less money too. I suspect anything that's trying to be an "ecosystem" or "suite" is on a monopolistic trajectory. The interoperability of first class IMAP support matters more to me than encrypted email storage anyway.
I would posit that there is a difference in attitude towards labor.
How many folks can work 80 hour weeks and then be on call all the time in Europe?
I was shocked when I was asked to go on call, as I didn't understand in the negotiations that it was an on call position. I did not go looking for another job or anything, but it was a bummer.
I really enjoy reading your blog posts, ploum!
I hope i can soon start contributing to the Geminispace again, both by writing some stuff and providing cool new software.
If you want to contribute to a Gemini software, don’t hesitate to have a look at my own offline browser: https://offpunk.net
I'm honest: I should probably revive Kristall proper and make it finally a 1.0.
My goal is to make a new browser for my own OS which should also be usable on normal PC systems, and make it basically a Kristall 2
There were many European search engines when there was still competition. Some of them better, some worse. Google won and the only competitors left are the ones that have search engine as a side thing. Not even Bing stands a chance, so not the most interesting market to get into.
The remaining competition has benefits and/or is also partly based on others. But they are pretty much explicitly niche projects.
Just doing what Google does isn't really interesting.
Similar with Google Maps. The monopoly means that all companies flock in and add information. The rest is bought.
It's a really silly idea to think that it's economically viable to just copy a the market leader on a consolidated money without a solid plan to make people switch over. Microsoft tried and they had the "unfair advantage" of Internet Explorer (etc.). They also did the whole copilot thing. Still it's largely irrelevant.
So if anything the question would have to be why did the US win out back then. My strong assumption is that the internet is a US thing in first place. Not just the DNS root, etc.
Why is it different for Russia and China? Because they have huge consolidated markets and strong interest. That isn't what you'll find in Europe.
A big reason there is no European Google is that unlike the US, there are no legal protections for scraping. Organizations like GEMA, newspapers and many others have weakened scraping rights in the EU greatly and most search engines try to act from US legislation.
I am ok with establishing a European-owned tech movement, replacing the US-owned alternatives. Sovereignty and supply-chain security are important in this day and age.
I'm just not ok with the socialism/communism tone of contributing toward a "common good". You can and should be able to build profit-driven tech companies. I don't really see a shame in that.
There is no shame in profit, I agree with that. But it seems to me fine to shift from "selling prefab software" to "writing/maintaining/customizing software to spec for pay" and having the resulting software available for everyone. It will result in more user freedom and further drive innovations, like the web has.
This can be (very) profitable, it just doesn't (as easily) allow for monopolistic hoarding of the code and the data it manages like the current megacorps do. And, more importantly, it doesn't allow squeezing the government (which is our tax money) as easily. This is illegitimate profit - artificially increased profit because the user has nowhere else to go.
further drive innovations This can be (very) profitable
I think these are things that are subjective and hard to measure. So it's hard to verify your claim.
shift from "selling prefab software" to "writing/maintaining/customizing software to spec for pay" it doesn't allow squeezing the government (which is our tax money) as easily
I don't think I understand your points here. Perhaps you have some specific examples in mind?
This is illegitimate profit - artificially increased profit because the user has nowhere else to go.
Again, I failed to see an example.
Even the most profitable business on earth, Google Search + Ads, has alternatives. The fact that all AI labs were able to spin up their own bot to scrape the entire web within a year of ChatGPT's launch told me that the problem was not about having the code or the data. The problem was that the profit margin was driven very low, thus it's hard for a new entrant to compete. With the AI race came a lot of economic incentive for folks to build and compete, thus we get more competition and consumers benefit.
Are you talking about ASML when you were hinting at monopolistic behavior?
I think these are things that are subjective and hard to measure. So it's hard to verify your claim.
Think about how for example web browsers used to be closed software (even though the web itself was open) and how this lead to stagnation (think IE, after Netscape died). Now there is a lot more happening on the web front. We don't need Silverlight or Flash anymore to do the things those technologies were intended to do.
I don't think I understand your points here. Perhaps you have some specific examples in mind?
Software still needs to be built or modified, even if it's all open source. Think more like going to an independent mechanic instead of being forced to go to the original dealership. The big tractor companies making their tractors un-serviceable is a good example of how this is not beneficial.
Even the most profitable business on earth, Google Search + Ads, has alternatives.
And so do US-based cloud hosting services etc. Yet, it's been very difficult to move off them because they are often technically "better" in some way or another.
Are you talking about ASML when you were hinting at monopolistic behavior?
I had no particular example in mind, I was thinking about the de facto monopoly that exists on all proprietary code - only the company that wrote the code can change it. And in case of cloud software, host it.
