back to article EU digital sovereignty project Gaia-X opens its summit with the departure of Scaleway

French cloud hosting outfit Scaleway is to depart the EU's data sovereignty project, Gaia-X, with CEO Yann Lechelle worrying that what began with splendid ideals is getting increasingly mired in the status quo. Scaleway's announcement came as the second Gaia-X summit got under way, titled "Here to deliver", and amid rumblings …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We saw this one coming ages ago

    To be honest, the whole project felt a tad naïve to start with. Money always wins over politics because elections are only once every so often, whereas bribes and the potential for cushy jobs are forever..

    Yes, I'm a cynic. Prove me wrong.

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: We saw this one coming ages ago

      And politicians are never interested in addressing corruption and they ensure police is kept busy with mountains of other crime, so they never have time to screen those wife's accounts...

    2. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge

      Re: We saw this one coming ages ago

      I agree that the project seems naive, but mainly because innovation does not occur by committee. The big cloud providers built their clouds by stumping up capital, hiring top-flight engineers, and committing tremendous amounts of engineering time. Until a European company or consortium is willing and able to commit the time and capital, anything else is just hot air.

  2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Effort

    If tech people slaving away and wasting their lives at big corporations ganged up to create a clone of Office 365 that will run on Linux, then probably 50% of Windows users will no longer have any reason to use it.

    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Effort

      Sorry, you mean the tech people slaving away and making stonking great paychecks as a result? Yes, I'm sure they want to give up their fat paychecks and stock grants to work on a profit-free open source project which will be used by the twelve or so desktop Linux users, at least half of whom will refuse to use it because the licensing for the font anti-aliasing technology is not sufficiently ideologically pure.

      1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

        Re: Effort

        That's funny. Most tech people don't make significantly more than other jobs. They seem smart, but somehow they okay paying more tax than corporations they work for, watching lavish offices CEOs flying private jets and then coming back to rented shoebox drinking away their stonking salary...

        1. Falmari Silver badge

          Re: Effort

          @elsergiovolador "That's funny. Most tech people don't make significantly more than other jobs."

          But they do make significantly more than no job. Let's forget that there are already Office clones out there. But who is going to pay this gang to produce an Office 365 clone.

          Or is this gang going to form a company and pay themselves from the sales of the clone?

          Maybe if successful they may in time become a big corporation. Nah, that's already been done. :)

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Effort

          That's funny. Most tech people don't make significantly more than other jobs.

          This is the UK income by percentile.

          https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

          A quick look at jobs shows that a job as a 2nd line tech on a helldesk pays 28-30k; which is 58%-63% by percentile points and so within the top 40% of jobs in the country. Helldesks are generally poorly paid, and people tend to get paid less than this anywhere else. Managing a helpdesk or being IT Manager at an SME would tend to add at least £5k to the previous figures, pushing you up to the top 30% of the population.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Effort

      "La Libré ou la mort!"

      Translated: "Give me Libre or give me death!"

      The battle call of Libre Office since May 5, 1789.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "since May 5, 1789"

        Nice analogy - they didn't get much freedom, and then started killing each other to show who was purer ideologically - then they got a couple of Napoleons....

        I wish I could avoid a period of Terror on my PCs... it's only good that Stallman is too greed and too lazy to act like a Robespierre.

        If's also funny how activists keep on using the Spanish word "Libre" as if Latin countries had created much freedom and democracy in the past two centuries... they keep on generating dictators and authoritarian regimes with an incredible easiness. But it does show that there is a specific political ideology behind them - which has nothing to do with technology.

        1. captain veg Silver badge

          Re: "since May 5, 1789"

          While libre is indeed a word in Spanish, I've always assumed that this particular borrowing is from French. The French Republic is a lot more democratic than the United Kingdom.

          -A.

      2. Potemkine! Silver badge

        Re: Effort

        The battle call of Libre Office since May 5, 1789.

        Probably not May 5, 1789. August 26, 1789 would fit better IMHO.

  3. captain veg Silver badge

    nominative determinism

    Lechelle is French for "[the] scale". Could this be a made up name? Like the preposterous "Sid Nag"?

    -A.

  4. TimMaher Silver badge
    WTF?

    Gaia-X

    Are they here to save the world?

    Which marketing numpty was allowed to blag that one?

    James Lovelock (102) will be spitting.

  5. bigtimehustler

    Well, who else are they going to use? The whole idea of cloud is scale and multi region deployment. A small company simply can't compete at that and they never will. Much the same as I can't set up a water infrastructure company and suddenly start supplying the whole of the Midlands.

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