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.
@Zerush i am so long waiting for a linux phone, that can be used as daily driver (for everyone!) made in eu! signal, thunderbird, firefox, and i am happy … the rest i can handle from firefox as webapp…
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.
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.
Well, you can’t expect the whole net of dependency to be torn down that quickly when it took decades to be established. Especially if you want a somewhat normal life.
Even before the latest acceleration into fascism I kept looking for alternatives of almost everything I use and the pain is something I’ve just got used to when it started with switching to Linux only over 20 years ago. Of course I still get envious when iPhone users just quickly AirDrop some pics, so I get why it’s not always easy to switch to alternatives.
But alternatives exist. Exploring them has become a lot more mainstream and they get more funding and support.
When you and your wife send pics over KDE Connect instead is a powerful moment. Still requires one phone to connect to the other over hotspot or be on the same network at home, but its slick otherwise.
What do Canadians have to do with European tech sovereignty? Why are you trying to hijack this thread?
And for Canadians, what realistic alternatives are you suggesting for everything you’ve listed?
If you want to be taken seriously, start by proposing an actionable plan.
I don’t use Android, Google, Linkedin, Indeed, or FB, and I don’t even know what IG is. I didn’t bother to close the accounts. Canada has no credit card yet. I paid for MS software before US GOP went nuts.
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.
Maybe something like OpenStack?
This is basically kubernetes with a couple of custom resource definitions, no?
nix?
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.
Nokia, Fairphone, Volla. All EU Vendors.
Nokia doesn’t do phones anymore. HMD Global (Finnish company) bought the Nokia brand for phones and used it but apparently they’ve switched away from it recently.
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.
Good! One can no longer trust the current US regime.
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.
Friendly little reminder:
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” - Benito Mussolini
Spread it around with every German you know. Or even post on Germany related communities
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
They should also fund the projects that they’re using. Then everyone benefits.
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.
Bingo. Even just a small amount of what they were previously paying the US tech firms would mean huge advancements.
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…
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.
Windows is shit in the entreprise IMO.
It’s not just Trump - there’s a reason that Russia, Cuba, China, and North Korea have made moves to adopt Linux. The US has been seeking to weaponize their tech standards for a while, especially as their empire crumbles.
I think it wont crumble during our livetime. But the insane debt is going to make dollars worth less and less. Perhaps they switch to bitcoin… :)
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
The EU should also fulfill the double meaning of the headline and buy Valve corporation from Gabe Newell.
