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].
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.