My personal opinions

This blog post represents my personal opinions and is not an official Amedia Product and Technology blog post.

When friends becomes enemies

We have been leaning to much on our friend on the other side of the Atlantic ocean and it has been an awakening for a lot of us, now that the US is considered a threat to the free press and democracy.

YouTube, owned by Google, is removing documentation of war crimes by the Israelis on Gaza, on the order from the US government.

youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship

Amedia Product and Technology, being the backbone of the free press in Norway and soon Denmark, should not be using platforms where censorship from US government is happening.

Where did it all start

I am an "old" telecoms software engineer, with past in R&D in Nera Networks and Ericson Broadband. So when the new Jolla Phone CE came out, I was very excited.

Jolla Phone CE is a Finish Linux phone, with Norwegian software tech for app development and built in Turkey. They had the slogan "Europeans do it together".

Jolla Phone uses Sailfish OS and its UI is Qt. Qt originates from the Norwegian software company TrollTech.

Can we operate without US-software services

In my everyday life, both at work and private, I have been heavily dependent on US based software, service and phones (not so much other hardware actually).

Github -> Codeberg

An alternative I found and have been using as my private code storage, is Codeberg. It fulfills all my needs from Github and actually has a better pages in my humble opinion.

"Codeberg is a democratic community-driven, non-profit software development platform operated by Codeberg e.V. and centered around Codeberg.org, a Forgejo-based software forge." - What is Codeberg

A nice guide for switching to CodeBerg. From Github to CodeBerg.

If you want to host your own, you can use Forgejo.

Google search -> Qwant

"The search engine that values you as a user, not as a product"

Qwant is surprisingly good, I was skeptic at first, but it has done the job for me, most of the times. I actually think has a more clean layout and easier to scroll past the three first hits, -in which I know are sponsored.

You can read more about Qwant on Better Web

Gmail -> Tuta Mail

Tuta I haven't been using this more than a couple of days, but so far its surprisingly good. Nicer UI than Gmail in the browser and they have an app for iOS, Android, Linux, Mac and Windows.

European alternatives

In my search for alternatives, I found this brilliant page. European Alternatives

Conclusion

Moving away from US base software, services and phones in my everyday life, was not as hard as i thought it would be.

I will continue my quest for a US software free life.