they can't do much. EU is a vassal of US.

PS they already were put in a position to allow MS (US) to kill Nokia. we all know the consequences here.

all this mobile tech development since 200X has been strongly influenced by politicians & intelligence agencies once they woke up to see the possibilities.

1. sure thing, my theoretical government that is only concerned with my happiness and well being not at the cost of creating or supporting misery in other countries far from my bed does need to take action and put an end to the actually situation we suffer right now that is OS development by for profit organizations that as a bonus highly likely maintain a very strong intelligence sharing connection to that exact type of (foreign yet over influential) government you are referring to. Those corporations while seducing people with fun services prove over and again to not be worthy of our attention, data and trust when exploiting naive toy addicted selfie people as their spying drones.

Ok for government sponsored mobiles devices that last 10 years and kindly focus on software development & security...even though unrealistic I would stand strongly with this opinion if I was living in one of the countries currently in the cross hairs. You don't want the enemy to read your minds.
We trust the government with our drinking water for ...x sake, euh wait..
Bring on that OS, funding, marketing, the local jobs and make it a proud export product to take or leave those other countries loving honest mobile communication.


It will take time to reset. EU was somewhat funding Symbian development for implementation in Washing Machines etc.. Ignoring the fact that some companies are too important to be purchased away in smart business deals and they EU could not quit the chosen path..
Skype + Nokia shareholders should have been guided/seduced/ purchased to accept government sponsored (side) project with better funding than Microsoft had offered.
Today the momentum, factories and teams are gone.
Start from scratch with less than we could have had in 2013 is a sad thing to do but looking forward, why not, at some point someone has to call the scam for what it was and act upon it..If we really need these tech things that is.

Correct, they can't. But not for the reason you give. The EU is actually quite strong at standing up to the US. See just the recent retaliatory tariffs they imposed on the US in response to Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminium.

They are also strong against individual US companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook. And I am sure you've heard about GDPR.

You may notice that in the Trump's trade war case the EU acted in a reactive way. Something happened and they responded in kind. This tactic is called tit for tat and, in game theory, is classified as one of the "nice strategies": never be the first one to attack. It may sound weak but numerous studies have been done to pitch "nice" and "nasty" strategies against each other and, although trigger-happy, nasty strategies usually tend to get a quick advantage at first, nice strategies always win in the long run.

The reason the EU cannot do much about the US-based OS hegemony is because they cannot go to Company X and tell them, "thou shalt produce Product Y". That would be dictatorship.

Nor can they go to Company X and tell them, "though shalt not sell to Company Y". That would be acceptable under anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws but such things can be and are done at national government level.

There are only two ways the EU could make a non-US mobile OS happen:

1. Set up a company to do that. Which, as kinggo correctly pointed out, would be hugely inefficient and most likely doomed to failure. Partly because of the incompetence kinggo has mentioned and partly because of the (justified, IMHO) mistrust of the general public to put their devices in the hands of a government.
2. Pick a company that is developing an independent OS and support them. To be fair, I do not know why they have not done that with Jolla, I assume Jolla never asked. But even that would not guarantee a success. Competitors might (rightfully) see it as an unfair advantage, which would break the "never strike first" rule.

they try sometimes at specific cases, but nothing really major.
they know where the line is drawn. and if some politician forgets about it, he is reminded or removed.

PS Germany trying to run Nordstream2 is a good case.
Will be interesting to see if they succeed, and what price they will have to pay for that (another Dieselgate or stay-put acceleration pedal of VAG once again ).

I think SailfishOS and could be promoted and further developed in a Horizon 2020 project. A consortium including Jolla could submit a proposal, I think it would raise interest, Jolla has been around long and is credible enough.

A proposal would likely need to focus on innovations like IoT, Blockchain, Smart Cities etc. or whatever buzzwords are needed to be considered innovative and eligible for research funding these days. A proposal needs to match expectations of specific calls.

There is a huge overhead in running H2020 projects and maybe the Jolla team doesn't have the experience. So they likely need a partner to help with that. Shouldn't be too hard to find one in the Finnish tech scene.

(Not much related to Sailfish X for XA2 but an interesting discussion).

I doubt EU will help Jolla since it's partly Russian.
And nowadays it's a toxic word
Besides, nobody will let them do anything significant.

Oh, and now ARM (UK-owned before, JP-owned now) pulls the plug on huawei. Speaking of vassals...

PS at least it might accelerate the adaptation of riscV


Doesn't it look like the US is trying to kill major phone maker once again? [psst. Nokia. ] Although the 5G factor maybe even more significant in this case.
Free market, they said...

AFAIK, US does not have 5G equipment manufacturer. Apart from Huawei, there's only Nokia and Ericsson as significant players in that area. And considering that Ericsson signed a deal with t-com (not sure but probably for every market) that might mean that half of US market is already gone.

Huawei is the most significant player in 5G and hold the majority of 5G patents too. It will be very difficult for other players to deliver 5G networks without Huawei's partnership.

You don't understand. It's not about getting everything for US. It's about getting everything major in the hands of US+satellites (aka vassals, or call it 5 eyes, 20 eyes, etc), because they can control them and they're somewhat 'friendly'.
So US is ok for Sony to be major in anything (because it has power over Japan), they're ok with Ericsson/Nokia with 5G (cause it has power over EU, and they don't have their own players in this market).

But they're not ok with Huawei (China), because they don't have the same amount of control over them.

Also they might from time to time screw even the satellites if it benefits their own (US) players and gives even more control (see killing Nokia over Google/Apple, or throwing obstacles over Nordstream2, because they have their own condensed gas players).