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Comment by chl | Hacker News Reader

Even worse: By revenue of the companies on Truffle's Top 100 list, apparently.

I have no idea how tail-heavy the landscape of European software companies is.

BTW, could you supply some examples of the "fantastic software" from Europe you grew up using? Just curious.

Growing up it was mostly music and games. On the East Coast, with parents tolerant of tying up the phone line with lots of BBSing, I waited for software to percolate over to my local BBSs, and probably half of it came from Europe.

An awful lot of stuff written for the C64 and Amiga. And then when the same dev traditions moved onto the PC, that stuff. The demoscene and peripheral software movements figured pretty heavily into it.

For example, I spent thousands of hours in Protracker (Finland I believe), Scream Tacker III (Finland), Fast Tracker 2 (Sweden I think)...there was also a few graphic programs I mucked around with Sculpt 3d (England I believe)..a few toy fractal programs, there was a great piece of music software I used for a spell from Spain that I can't for the life of me remember, some ANSI graphics editors. I'm currently keeping a copy of the pro-audio level Renoise installed (a pile of Euro-authors if I've ever seen one) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise

but I also spent thousands of hours watching the latest scene productions coming out of Europe at the time. Growing up on the East Coast, we ended up with a small, but relatively healthy demoscene in the early and mid 90s and productions routinely (and quickly) found their way onto local BBSs.

But don't forget that Linux is originally a piece of European software (Finland), UAE (which let's me relive some of my youth) was started in Germany, theproduckkt (Germany), and on and on and on...

and then there's other stuff I'm keeping tucked away for when I get some time to start playing around with micro-controllers http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/ (Sweden)

most of this is just stuff I was interested in at the time, there's tons I never even touched

basically a tradition of software on a different axis from commercial proprietary and free (freedom) software, but I bet if you look at the contributor lists for lots of popular open-source/free (freedom) software, you'll find long lists of European contributors.

edit after review I've realized there's more German contribution to my software history than I expected, sorry Germans!

Also, glad to see lots of folks jumping up and calling out some great German softs.

Much the music software I use is German

Ableton Live Native Instruments Steinberg (since superceded by Ableton)

There's a pretty large body of German music software developers, both large and indie.

If I recall Logic (now Apple) was also German, and there are a number of other good European music software companies like Propellerheads.

good point, there's lots of awesome German audio software out there..

I'd add Celemony to that list as well.

"Scream Tacker III (Finland), Fast Tracker 2 (Sweden I think)"

Yeah, Scream Tacker III was made by demogroup Futurecrew, from which some went on to start Remedy Entertainment (Max Payne, Alan Wake) and other companies. Fast Tracker 2 was made by demogroup Triton, from which some went on to start Starbreeze Studios (Chronicles of Riddick/The Darkness). Also DICE (Battlefield series) has demoscene roots in the form of The Silents. Even Rovio (Angry Birds) got started after winning some compo at Assembly.

Reminded me of Soundclub DOS (1991) and then Windows (1996). Those came from Estonia. It was done by the team that later wrote Kazaa and Skype. http://www.bluemoon.ee/history/scdos/index.html http://www.bluemoon.ee/history/scwin/index.html

Funnily enough, I remember Blue Moon better for SkyRoads.

I wrote a semi-clone of it in Qbasic (learning a bit about 3D projection on the way). I later ported it naïvely to Python and it ran slower. :D

Also: KDE and OpenOffice (as StarOffice) started in Germany.

Thanks for taking the time to write it all up!

Brought back some fond memories, and I hadn't heard about Renoise before ...

You're making a very good point. I don't have the hard numbers, but having observed the European software industry for a long time, my feeling is that it is _very_ tail heavy, particularly if you count all the custom development and services revenue.

Another important question is what counts as software revenue in the first place. What about London's heavily software based financial services? What about software embedded in Germany's massive industrial exports?

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