The interview
Q: What is your name?
My name is Gaël Duval, I'm a free software advocate and Linux pioneer in France. I'm (co-)founder of Mandriva and Ulteo and today lead a new ambitious project: the Open Source operating system /e/.
Q: What is your product?
/e/ is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), it is an operating system for smartphones, offering its own web services and entirely free from Google product and services.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
Due to the privacy-friendly nature of Murena, it is difficult to accurately estimate the total number of users of our products. There are currently over 70,000 active cloud accounts and at least 25,000 phone users, many of which are companies of all sizes that are closely following our development.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? How is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
We focus on data privacy on smartphones. We are proposing a viable alternative to Google and Apple with our /e/ smartphones and our Murena cloud services in partnership with Fairphone.
If you look at a classic Android smartphone, in one month, our Exodus Privacy tool has blocked more than 400,000 trackers. This does not only violate so many aspects of data privacy, it also generates a considerable volume of data being transmitted putting a significant toll on the entire network. The general public is still relatively unaware that so much data is being transmitted in background processes on their smartphones. Awareness only increases slowly, but the more people realise, the more they are looking for alternative solutions, like /e/. Murena.io offers a single and easy-to-use interface for messaging services, organization (calendar and contact management), as well as an online office suite with a hard disk storage on the Cloud.
Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?
/e/ is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) of course, but we also integrated other open source solutions such as Nextcloud and OnlyOffice. By taking the AOSP codebase, cleaning it from everything Google and replacing Google applications with free software applications running on servers not belonging to Google, Murena.io knows how to meet the expectations of privacy-sensitive customers and ensures a level of security, protection and freedom in accordance with European standards.
By using an application store that, while favouring free software alternatives to commonly used applications also offers Android applications that are compatible with its company values, Murena highlights the issues of competition and interoperability.
This is because the duopoly of the Android and Apple application platforms goes against the principle of fair competition and market regulation defended by the European Union. However, they are impossible to enforce as the authorities themselves use these proprietary non-European solutions, which does not encourage the general public to change their habits. It also prohibits the development of European offers of similar quality and functionality to US products, which often also not respect the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
There is a big grey legal area which would benefit from being addressed at the national and supra-national institutional level with a questioning of political practices and the reluctance to trust local players - either due to ignorance or fear of risk-taking. If we look abroad, the US has a very protectionist policy, favouring its small and medium-sized companies through initiatives such as the Small Business Act, where the government requires more than 30% of public procurement orders to go to US technology SMEs, thus guaranteeing the possibility of growth and a lasting presence in the market.
There is a technology gap because in Europe we lack similar legislation. This gap is unfortunately increased further with an educational policy that offers little incentive, particularly in France, to study computer science. Training is very uneven from school to school, it is expensive and above all far insufficient, leading to a flagrant lack of French computer engineers, the best of them leaving for the US and China. Our educational, industrial and public procurement policies all accelerate the decline of IT entrepreneurship in France, which was used to be a leader in this field a few decades ago.