cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/37846820

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].

  1. ZDNet - Europe’s plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source - and it’s gaining steam ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    Honestly I think the concerns are driven by ability for non-transparent funding in FOSS. EU corruption is really not what people in rosy glasses think it is.

    Well, OK, that bit about resilience is also true.

    This is really more similar to Russian “import replacement” than it seems. Just everything happening in Russia has that sewer flavor to its perception, and the same thing happening in the EU has that flavor of being cool and right, but in essence it’s a vaccine against what’s called “sanctions” when it’s directed at the “bad guys”, and doesn’t have a name when it’s directed at you, but still can happen.

    I dunno why I wrote this, just there’s that spirit of pessimism in everything happening in the big world now. Makes one want to forget about it, and get busy with working just a bit better, maintaining some comfort of habitat, making POV-Ray renders, sometimes writing stupid TCL scripts and trying to progress in the “women” area.