OpenForum Europe, held at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre this week, dared to ask a question that has been absent in the face of increasingly desperate pleas to reduce dependency on information and communications technology (ICT) that is based outside the European Union: can small countries do this without getting steamrolled by the bloc’s giants? It’s a good question.

Following the European Commission’s open source strategy, which aims to promote free and open source software use by EU governments and public bodies, as well as businesses, the conference sought to unpick what smaller countries need to do in order to build their own technologies and platforms, rather than simply copy strategies designed in bigger markets.

Clara Thébert, policy advisor at organisers OpenForum Europe, said that Europe’s open source strategy “needs to deliver for smaller countries as well as its largest economies”.

“Countries such as Ireland should have a meaningful role in shaping Europe’s technology agenda and a clear opportunity to benefit from it.

Ireland’s presidency [of the EU] gives us a chance to bring those perspectives directly into the European policy discussion.

Today is about understanding what smaller countries need to build their own capabilities, remain competitive and contribute to Europe’s digital future,” she said in a statement.

The goal is worthy.

Indeed, nothing about this is wrong, and small EU nations do need to worry about getting flattened by, for example, France or Germany, with their giant economies and, at least in the former case, desire to assert itself on the global stage.

But what is more interesting to me is that it is happening at all.

It is genuinely mystifying to me how Europe, home to major minicomputer manufacturers in the 1970s, not to mention a major player in what we used to call microcomputers, in both hardware and software, in the 1980s and early 1990s, can find itself at a point where it is so thoroughly dependent on not only foreign-manufactured technology, but foreign-coded, hosted and regulated software.

Well, it’s not mystifying at all, actually.

That was just rhetoric.

What it is is depressing.

The path of least resistance is one thing, but the scale of Europe’s computing and IT SNAFU is astonishing.....