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].
Open source is the only realistic way forward for Europe, since reimplementing popular US platforms from scratch would be a herculean effort. Hopefully there will be a lot more funding and polish for popular projects as a result. Maybe Europe will get serious about using Linux instead of Windows finally.
Clearly it isn’t easy to switch away from US corporative services and the way to go is OpenSource and if not, using instead EU products and services. It’s still a long way to go, the way is made walking. It’s about souvereignity, not depending on greedy US companies, less with this stupid Australopithecus as President. Time to show him the middlefinger, as at least Spain already does.
Yeah, it’s going to be a long process realistically, and hopefully there’s actual sustained state level commitment to getting that done from the European countries. Frankly, it should’ve been obvious why it’s a bad idea to become so dependent on foreign tech, but better late than never.
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.
Someone else on this post made a huge comment about how Spain has been using lots of Open Source stuff for long time
But steam isn’t open source? /s
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.
GOG is DRM free though!
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.
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)
Why don’t we just stop calling it AI and call it software? The Swiss have some potentially very useful maybe even revolutionary software. Ok great, let’s see it and let’s see what they do.
Agree, better to call it LLM, because intelligence is needed by the user, not a thing of an algorrithm. And yes, Swiss is known for good products, but as said before, also other EU countries use products which are even better as the ones from the US. Only rest to also use these. See eg. the German KDE and its products, even the US forked these, eg. Blink and WebKit are forks from the KHTML engine by KDE, used by its Konqueror browser (Linux only).
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.
It’s almost mind-blowing how people still rely on Azure, Windows, and MS Office for really sensitive shit. Like, MS might as well be an arm of the US Government if they aren’t already. All the foreign governments storing sensitive shit in Azure servers is just fucking wild to me. So what if the data centres are stored outside of the USA? The parent company is still the parent company.
I’m interested to see what an open source cloud standard would look like. There’s a lot of elements that share functionality between Azure and AWS, but they’re just different enough that it’s a massive pain in the arse to move from one to the other and you basically have to re-write your Terraform from scratch.
If there was something that was standard so I could write Terraform that goes “I want thirteen microservices all running in docker containers and a message bus with these types of message that lets them communicate” without specifying the exact implementation, I would be a happy camper.
nix?
This is basically kubernetes with a couple of custom resource definitions, no?
Maybe something like OpenStack?
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.
conservative german politicians in particular continue to pursue their shady dealings.
and will push their gov’ts back into the microsoft/google fold when they approve purchase of the next big system; and you can only hope that palantir isn’t it.
It’s an recurrent claim by the right wings, but same as the Chatcontrol, rejected, because incompatibility with the privacy rights in the EU which would be violated with Palantir and the Chat control… There isn’t any reason to introduce the control, because the current law permits an individual chat control in an crime investigation with an court order, but not an global control, which would be the same as open and controlling private cards and correspondence, which obvious is a no go.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/chatkontrolle-eu-deutschland-bmjv-hubig-whatsapp-signal
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/chatkontrolle-eu-justizministerin-100.html
Spread it around with every German you know. Or even post on Germany related communities
Friendly little reminder:
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” - Benito Mussolini
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I would love to see a SailfishOS phone like Jolla’s gain more widespread market/sales
Isn’t sailfish proprietary?
I had to double check. It’s based on Linux and Open Source Software, but the UI is proprietary.
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 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.
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!
not a moment too soon… we’ve worked on this back in the early 2000s, then Microsoft steamrolled everything with local government contracts (coughtBRIBEScough) and look how well that turned out.
In Spain there are more and more shops selling PCs only with FreeDOS to the user choice which OS he want to use. I need to use Windows for several reasons, but it’s gutted and debloated to the mere OS (<1GB).
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
Good! One can no longer trust the current US regime.
The EU should also fulfill the double meaning of the headline and buy Valve corporation from Gabe Newell.
They should also fund the projects that they’re using. Then everyone benefits.
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.
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? :)
EU is pretty good at funding stuff actually, but mind your pitchforks if you see Hyprland, Ladybird or some other bigotfueled projects on some collateral-funding list.
Wait what? What’s going on with those projects?
Man, I knew about the Omarchy and Hyprland stuff, but with how much people praise and look forward to Ladybird, I had no idea the project lead was an asshole too. I guess I’ll spread the word then.
Here’s a Mastodon post featuring some screenshots of his shitty tweets last month.
Well we are discussing this on Lemmy which has awful developers, you can’t always avoid terrible peoples work unfortunately.
Yeah, but at least Lemmy devs aren’t getting money from people. I feel really bad for people who bought Framework laptops, only to see their money go towards Nazis.
Maybe I shouldn’t give up on SimpleX Chat then. The dev sucks but at least they don’t get a penny out of me or many others. Although I never found any groups I wanted to stay in anyway…
Oh people are donating money to them, and there are regular donation drives on other instances which include funds going to Lemmy development.
