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.

Agree. As an european I would go so far to say that a lot of european alternatives are not better at all. Some form of quality/trust indicator would be helpful though. No company that is distributing malware to its customers should be on any recommendation list.

> There are also alternatives such as VSCodium, Neovim, or Emacs. In some cases, the alternative to an American company should not be a European company, but rather free software.

I agree in theory but VSCodium wouldn't be a thing without Microsoft continuing development of VS Code so you're dependent on American software nonetheless. If the goal is true sovereignty then VSCodium isn't it unless it becomes a truly independent fork aka when LibreOffice forked OpenOffice.

Well, instead of chatting online you just ride your motorbike to friends.

I guess both produce two-wheeled one-person mobility devices? There is some overlap in utility, but the audience doubting between a petro motorcycle and an electric scooter would be vanishingly thin, I think.

Anything is an alternative to anything else if you think about it. Want a Chinese smartphone? Have you considered eating a delicious European made chocolate bar instead?

At least that's the vibe I'm getting from this site.

This dispels all my doubts regarding the utility of this website.

"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.

Ideally those are free and open source

Still in it's infancy but Moose OS is fully EU built github.com/onmoose/os

Why? I have been using mailbox.org for a few years and I am very happy with it.

I like the UI simplicity of posteo. They still have quite some advanced features like encrypted address books and more, with good documentation on the implications. No regrets so far, using it since beginning of the year or so.

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.

Proton not supporting third party apps and requiring minimum Android 10 to launch their app can keep their app for themselves, clearly they don't want more users.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

I don't think a good idea to limit yourself to solutions only from your geographical area, but it's also a very ingrained " not from my tribe" human sentiment. It's hard to fight it.

> How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts

It seems like a provincial mindset.

I’m not sure about sentiment, buying local always made sense, as you invest into your surroundings, to some degree.

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.

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.

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.

I’d bet most of those comments are from self-hating American leftists.

Coca Cola is kind of a solved problem since LabCoatz made a good reverse engineered version. If the company decides to leave Europe any of their former bottlers can start making it under a different name, and it's not breaking any American laws because the formula was never patented.

That's actually where competition is easy enough that it produces something worthwhile. Afri Cola and Fritz Cola aren't bad at all (even if their market share is only a footnote to Coke and Pepsi).

pff, that disgusting sugar water is vastly inferior to Kofola (heck even Pepsi is somehow drinkable more that than sweet crap)

but I agree with first paragraph