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].
That does make sense, but Im more referring to the people in the company. For example when I was working as IT, there were people who were still using Office 2016 at a time when Office 365 was already out for a while (dont… just dont… I agree with whatever you are thinking of commenting about this - it was insane). When we finally upgraded them all to 365 we as IT had to show them how to do their basic workflow stuff again because the interface was so different. Even microsoft, which is a software vendor (arguably one of the biggest one if not THE biggest) wouldn’t deal with training your employees for something like that. In that regard, I guess its the same situation as an OSS developer who just puts their product out, provides the most basic support maybe in terms of github issues, and calls it a day.
My comment was more on the internal relationship between the IT guys who will create the training resources and then for a period of time guide the regular employee through using the software, and the regular employee just using the software, rather than the organisation and the person/group/company providing the software