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].


  1. ZDNet - Europe’s plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source - and it’s gaining steam ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      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.

        • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          12 hours ago

          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.