This always irritates me, because it used to be just like that. First time we bought Jira, it was like a (small ) one-off charge on someone’s card, and included full source code to let you build it yourself.
This is kind of an interesting contrast with BSH (Bosch and Siemens home appliances ), who are also German.
They appear to have seen making their Home Connect platform open as at least in part a matter of compliance with EU data transparency and portability laws.
- lots of places kind of Teams by default
- or Slack or discord m, even WhatsApp
- or in intensive cases, things like Refinitiv, Bloomberg, and, Symphony , which is kind of federated, but adds all the automation and also governance stuff needed for 100MM trades via IM and the like.
I can't speak for how effective the process is, but this is the idea behind the EU/UK GPSR's Authorised Representative framework - though not exactly local (that would be excessive, since GPSR also applies to much smaller sellers too)
Regulation of cars , like anything, is expensive. It’s worthwhile for cars for safety reasons, but bikes are cheaper, and also way less dangerous in general, so need a lighter hand.
The current cutoff in EU is probably right, above a certain power level, e bikes are l, broadly, treated an motorcycles (licensing, type approval, insurance etc) , below that and with non-e bikes, is really just about the basics, eg are the wheels firmly attached and do the brakes and lights work?
More practically, it’s about if someone hits you or someone you care about with their car or the like.
Aggregation of data like Flock does is a different matter and can be handled separately. Like I mentioned in my other comment, other countries tend not to have things like Flock, since they understand unregulated data processing such as that is problematic for all sorts of reasons; the US is a big , big outlier in this area.
Depends on how decent your friends are… one couple I know in particular, they both love MTB, but have different endurance levels, so with one having an e-bike it evens out nicely.