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].
I wonder if resurrecting Firefox OS might still be an option. It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.
There’s the KaiOS fork, but the direction is not really the same since it’s more targeted to low power keypad-based phones… and I believe they replaced much of the Gonk layer with a very stripped down low level Android base which isnt fully open source… maybe if they coordinated with the LibrePhone project and some hw manufacturers (like EU-based Nokia) we’d get a fully free stack.
Wasn’t that also the idea with the first iPhone and iOS1 until they realized the potential of native apps?
Did they work on developing new web standards to unlock that potential on the web?
Back then HTMLv5 wasn’t even a thing, there was no concept of video/microphone/gyroscope/gps access for webapps, notifications, web workers, web sockets, offline PWA webapps, etc. It was not a viable idea unless they actually were to invest big. They weren’t so committed. In Firefox OS even the dialer was a webapp, Mozilla brought forth a lot of innovative APIs to make it possible, many of which are in use today even after the OS was discontinued. And nowadays you even have things like Webassembly that allows you to code it in C or whatever low level language you want.
I feel Apple has always been more interested in their own ecosystem. Opening the web to have the same level of potential as the native apps from their walled garden goes against that strategy, so I don’t believe they were really serious about that approach, it’s always been more interesting for them to prioritize their native apps.