The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe’s developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants’ platforms.
In a “Call for Evidence” published this week, Brussels says the EU’s reliance on non-European technology suppliers (read: US tech giants) has become a strategic liability, limiting choice, weakening competitiveness, and creating supply chain risks across everything from cloud services to critical infrastructure. The consultation, which will run from January 6 to February 3, is an early move toward a formal strategy on “European Open Digital Ecosystems,” which would treat open source as core infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.
According to the Commission, dependence on foreign vendors makes it harder for Europe to control its digital stack, potentially opening the door to security and resilience issues in sensitive sectors. Open source offers a way out of that bind by underpinning “a diverse portfolio of high-quality and secure digital solutions” that can act as viable alternatives to proprietary platforms, the EC said.
This is absolutely massive for the FOSS community. A sovereign nation has resources that dwarf anything that the FOSS community has ever had access to.
Now, they just need to repeal the anti-circumvention laws. That’ll cut the US tech sector deeply by allowing us to use the products that we pay for in the ways that we want.
_Nico198X_@europe.pub 14 hours ago
look at the success Steam has made prying power away from Microsoft by investing into Linux.
Freedom is right there, just invest in it and we all benefit.