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].
They should also fund the projects that they’re using. Then everyone benefits.
Public money, public infra and public funding? :)
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?
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
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.
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.
Bingo. Even just a small amount of what they were previously paying the US tech firms would mean huge advancements.