That sounds great. Outline only has SSO in the per-user paid version. If you decide on providing additional functionality in a non-free "enterprise" version, please don't use the per usermonth model for people running it on prem.
This was a great blog post highlighting some of the weird business models that plague cloud computing. I tried to find competitors to suppliers like Oxide in the EU where there should be a huge amount of business cases for "datacenter in a box". Surprisingly there are very few options available (yes, Azure Stack is available but there is still licensing per cpu for that).
We have definitely had the same question! I think the answer is twofold: it's technically hard -- and it's cross-domain in that you need both hardware AND software to pull it off. On the one hand, it's not like such expertise doesn't exist (and we are not doing our own silicon here!), but on the other, even with the right team, it is time-consuming (and therefore expensive).
If the difficulty and cost were the only challenge, this would be a candidate to do at a larger company, but the cross-domain nature of it makes it really thorny: you would need a lot of internal alignment to succeed -- and (more challenging) you need to maintain that internal alignment for a protracted period of time. I had done something not wholly dissimilar (though frankly much less ambitious) at Sun back in the day[0] -- and even though Sun was much more amenable to this kind of disruptive endeavor than any company of its size[1], we barely pulled it off. Indeed, some of the worst behavior I ever saw at Sun was from the people who trying to prevent us from succeeding because they felt it threatened them. I simply cannot imagine doing something more ambitious at Sun -- or as ambitious anywhere else.
We came to the conclusion that it really has to be new company formation -- which means raising money to do it, which means finding the right investors. Even though the upside is extraordinary, finding the right investors in hard tech is really, really tough[2]. So yes, there should be more options -- but there aren't, and there are frankly unlikely to be in the foreseeable future...
The company has quite some links to Russia. Until recently it was owned by a Russian company but headquartered in Riga, now they seems to have moved the headquarters in Singapore according to this Wikipedia edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/117266616... (which I'm not sure I can trust completely as there as been multiple attempt to remove any mention of Russia on that page)
But if I had to guess, the major development effort is still done in Russia.
The National Library of Sweden has made the raw digitized files available under CCBY here for those of you who want to play around with their own visualization: https://data.kb.se/dark-17757824
Great work! I use it experimentally in a free service for people who want to subtitle videos. The small model runs o a USD8/mo VPS. Looking into running the medium model soon.
It would be interesting to know how many of government agencies use Google email services? Is the email interaction between citizen and state now predominantly in the hands of a foreign third party?
In Netherlands: not just the government, also pretty much every major business and even Universities (Groningen comes to mind). And not just Google, but also Microsoft (Teams, Outlook, etc).
I've often wondered whether that is the real main reason why so little innovation comes out of Europe vs the US: everything of economic, academic and geopolitical importance in Europe is streamed straight to the US and the sender is paying for the service of having valuable information leakable.
Groningen is an outlier in using Google Workspace for email iirc. Most of the Dutch universities I came into contact with (including the one I used to attend) were deep into on-prem Exchange, with some moving to O365.
