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.
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.
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?
Good! One can no longer trust the current US regime.
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.
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.
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.
Friendly little reminder:
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” - Benito Mussolini
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.
Bingo. Even just a small amount of what they were previously paying the US tech firms would mean huge advancements.
Agreed… And they will. They will want functions that are stable and works… They can easily put some funds into that…
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?
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.
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).
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!
Open steam sauce?
Nah.Open sauce steam?
Smart, democratic.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.
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.
