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.
A quick reminder in this context: The German government wants to introduce Palantir nationwide, even though this violates applicable law - both at the European and national levels. Contracts have even already been signed in some federal states.
Here is a link to a Campact petition calling on the SPD to block the CDU/CSU’s plans.
In my opinion, everyone living in Germany should sign both petitions - it is scandalous that this is even necessary, but unfortunately, conservative german politicians in particular continue to pursue their shady dealings.
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!
Do Android next. Please.
A thousand percent yes! Wait wait WAIT BIG IDEA!!!
Everybody listen up, let’s all suggest to EU Countries to partner up with PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, & Free Software Foundation’s Librephone project so they can all get funding!!
That way they can get made way faster than they are now
You need hardware vendors on board or you’ll get nowhere.
Eh, Europe is an important enough market that they could use legislation to get the desired result out of hardware vendors, or something close enough to it. If the EU or a majority of European nations stipulated that everything had to be compatible with open source operating systems I’m pretty confident that it would happen. There would be pushback. Likely they’d claim that it’d impede their ability to turn a profit, create development cost issues, and be extremely insecure, but once things were set into motion they would find a way to make it work.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Just wanted to highlight that strong software projects are not enough.
I work in SW for a device vendor and I see how much communication there is between OS, vendors and everything in between.
Yeah Canadians are so serious about boycotting the US, except everyone still uses Mastercard, Visa, Android, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Linkedin, Indeed, FB, IG, etc. etc. They can’t even press the free delete account button, what a great boycott! Finally after almost a year only the EU is just beginning to discuss digital sovereignty.
