Europe is moving decisively away from U.S. tech giants toward open-source alternatives, driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and reliability of American companies[1]. At the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, industry leaders emphasized that this shift isn’t about isolation but resilience.
“What we’re really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source allows us to be sovereign without being isolated,” said OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez[1:1].
This transition is already happening. The German state Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email solutions. Similar moves have been made by the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon[1:2].
European companies are stepping up to fill the gap with open-source alternatives, including:
- Deutsche Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud
- OVHcloud’s sovereign cloud services
- STACKIT and VanillaCore’s European-based offerings[1:3]
The movement gained additional momentum when the European Commission appointed its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024[1:4].
They should also fund the projects that they’re using. Then everyone benefits.
Agreed… And they will. They will want functions that are stable and works… They can easily put some funds into that…
Public money, public infra and public funding? :)
I’m pretty sure the reason why this won’t be happening is (as always): it doesn’t make the rich richer and it doesn’t have immediate benefits you can point to for your reelection.
Do Android next. Please.
Thierry Carrez commented, “Did you notice what I didn’t talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI.”
…
The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure," continued Carrez, "that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments.
He was so close to greatness :(
Well, respect AI, there is a big one from Swiss, Apertus with its PublicAI, using the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), also used by the CERN. All 100%FOSS and privacy centred. I currently use the PublicAI in my bookmarks (free account (nick,mail). The Apertus dataset can also be downloaded if someone want to selfhost it (~90 GB min)
respect AI
No thank you. Even if its FOSS it wastes tons of resources.
Well, compared to the energy used by the LHC, anyway, the Swiss use mostly Hydro-electric plants for the Energy, normal in Alpine zones. (~65% of Swiss energy is renevable (Hydro, Solar, Eolic). Even used the heat produced by the CSCS.
Anyway, there are tons of EU alternatives, even superior, to US products and services. It’s not a tecnically but an political problem to switch, which at least is on the way.
The LHC does not pollute the internet and produces 100s of millions scraping requests. The LHC is a truely glorius enginiering marvel.
Read about the procedence of the Apertus Data, there isn’t any copyright violation scrapping.
After so many decades of being reliant on US proprietary tech, now they’re moving away to foss?!
Sounds excellent but I’ll remain reluctant until I see wide scale adoption.
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I wonder if resurrecting Firefox OS might still be an option. It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.
There’s the KaiOS fork, but the direction is not really the same since it’s more targeted to low power keypad-based phones… and I believe they replaced much of the Gonk layer with a very stripped down low level Android base which isnt fully open source… maybe if they coordinated with the LibrePhone project and some hw manufacturers (like EU-based Nokia) we’d get a fully free stack.
It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.
Wasn’t that also the idea with the first iPhone and iOS1 until they realized the potential of native apps?
Did they work on developing new web standards to unlock that potential on the web?
Back then HTMLv5 wasn’t even a thing, there was no concept of video/microphone/gyroscope/gps access for webapps, notifications, web workers, web sockets, offline PWA webapps, etc. It was not a viable idea unless they actually were to invest big. They weren’t so committed. In Firefox OS even the dialer was a webapp, Mozilla brought forth a lot of innovative APIs to make it possible, many of which are in use today even after the OS was discontinued. And nowadays you even have things like Webassembly that allows you to code it in C or whatever low level language you want.
I feel Apple has always been more interested in their own ecosystem. Opening the web to have the same level of potential as the native apps from their walled garden goes against that strategy, so I don’t believe they were really serious about that approach, it’s always been more interesting for them to prioritize their native apps.
But steam isn’t open source? /s
While I wish there was an Open Source client, I can only imagine why Valve does not want that. First, it would help fakers and scammers too. Steam has a Scammer problem. Secondly, it could help the competition. At least an official API would go a long way, to enable the community to write their own Open Source client based on the API.
Valve doesn’t mind allowing the competition to use some of their more critical contributions such as Proton (and SteamOS code outside of the store/client launcher), so I don’t consider their situation problematic at all. Heck, competition (such as GOG) can have their users take advantage constantly by having their games load through Proton.
Proton builds and is based on bunch of Open Source software such as WINE. Valve cannot, even if they wanted to, make it closed source. The Steam client itself is closed source, so this is a decision Valve can make.
The OpenXR standard (created entirely by Valve and HTC) is open to everyone, alongside their SteamOS work for the Steam Deck (with the sole exception of the steam client).
Yes, it is a decision that they can make, but I personally don’t consider it unreasonable or irrational. They allow almost all of the other fruits of their labor to be used, and have no problems with things like fan derivative works.
The thing is, Valve wouldn’t even need to open source the client. If there was an official programming interface as an API to connect to (with online checks to verify off course), then people could build their own clients. The cool thing would be, only features they want to have and with the GUI toolkits and interface the way they want it could be possible. Totally open source too, at least on the client part. Maybe the official API and client could only do some stuff, not everything; in example selling or trading items or buying games would be not possible, but stuff like starting a game. This alone would be awesome.
Open steam sauce?
Nah.Open sauce steam?
Smart, democratic.I think that it don’t mean the Steam website, but steam pressure.
/s stands for sarcasm in case you are not aware.
I like sarcasm, but if you don’t know the people, it’s not always clear that it was in this sense. With eg. the PP of Google there are no doubts with: Your privacy is very important for us.
I mean yeah. Trump could tomorrow make some idiotic statement about tariffs on American cloud services like aws. Seriously, who would be surprised?
Before Trump, nobody would even suggest to distance themselves from the USA. Now, everyone is thinking it.
Great job I guess, if you want a planet where countries are fighting eachother instead of working together. But Trump mentality is that he must be the winner, always. He cant understand that sometimes another country being winner also helps his own. He must be the winner.
He is the typical guy in the sandbox that takes the entire sandbox because its all about him.
Your comments are not wrong, but also Trump is not the sole issue here. There would still be a problem even if he was removed from office today.
Proprietary software and services are an issue regardless of which government jurisdiction they fall under. It’s a good idea for the EU to be moving to open source instead of proprietary solutions based in the EU.
Yeah 100%. I just dont know if Europe can compete. There is no real European cloud with hundreds of services, and Linux in the enterprise world is much harder to administer than windows. Microsoft is good at selling their enterprise stuff.
I think all of that is going to put Europe behind. But maybe its good to get started. Perhaps that will actually lead to an entire market for making Linux as good as windows in the enterprise.
It seems like backend companies are ready for this, but today, what are the options for individual end users looking to escape google etc? Proton has a package with mail, storage, etc, murena for phones, nextcloud, opencloud, suite numerique, is the industry converging on any standards here like .odt for documents but for other standards and protocols?
Well, LibreOffice and other free office suites use by default .odt, but all are capable to open and export any other document format, even more than MSOffice is capable to do. In Spain since years administrations and companies are usin LibreOffice and OpenOffice without problems. Spain is one of the most advanced countries in the EU respect OpenSource-
Open Source Initiatives and Events in Spain
Spain has several notable open source initiatives and events spanning education, government, and industry:
Government Initiatives
The Galician government launched Mancomún in 2006 to promote free and open source software (FOSS), achieving significant cost savings by migrating public administration to LibreOffice and other open source tools[1]. By 2018, the government completed migration of all workstations to open source productivity suites, reducing licensing costs by 50% (€1.7 million annually)[1:1].
Major Events
Open Source Summit Europe takes place in Spain, with the 2023 event held in Bilbao from September 19-21[2]. The summit brings together developers, technologists and community leaders to advance open source innovation[2:1].
Education and Resources
Several Spanish-language open educational resources support learning:
- El Atareao (atareao.es), a Spanish blog focused on GNU/Linux and open source topics[3]
- Español Abierto, a collection maintained by the University of Texas for Spanish language learners[4]
- LibriVox’s Spanish audiobook collection featuring public domain works[4:1]
Business Adoption
Major companies recognize Spain’s open source expertise. In 2016, Accenture acquired Spanish firm Tecnilógica to expand its open source capabilities, noting the company’s skill in “using emerging and open source technologies”[5].
Wow, Spain is way ahead of my country (Sweden), we have much to learn. Unfortunately our politicians are not the best at the moment, but hopefully in the future.
I don’t begrudge Europe for doing this and they should absolutely keep going this direction but they are going to start sucking even more out of US users. Maybe it will help us move forward.
The good thing about open source is that it’s open, so hopefully it will benefit everyone. Of course, hosting always cost money, but the tech itself isn’t locking you in.
I don’t understand
I assumed they were saying the companies need specific amounts of revenue to cover their debts and if they lose foreign revenue streams, they’re going to make it up by increasing domestic prices.
Yes, this is what I meant.
Or just they make this much money so to continue making this amount they have to up prices somehow.
they are going to start sucking even more out of US users even more
:|
Maybe that EU kept MS&co in check?
That’s not how I see it, but there was some minimal resistance.Anyways, open sauce means tech giants are gonna illegally yoink the code, but slap some profit margins on (besides support that is).
That does sux the even more out of users.They didn’t necessarily keep them in check, but maybe kept growth slower Initially. However this is not my area, so take it with as much salt as you’d like.
Yeah but for this they need to open source the entire tech stack imo. You can run oss on a closed source bootloader, but the end result will still be the enshittification and hardware lock-down.
Auditable open source hardware and wireless-chips are the real deciding factor in the long game!
