Commission wants to commercialise open source for sovereignty

The European Commission wants more commercialisation of European open source software to strengthen the continent’s digital sovereignty, according to a consultation published on Tuesday.

Open source software is important in this context as it decentralises development, reducing reliance on tech gatekeepers by distributing source code and allowing for reuse and adaptation.

In the document, the Commission argues that existing EU support efforts for open source projects have had good results – but that supporting research programmes alone is not enough to ensure homegrown open source technologies can successfully scale up.

“Much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants,” the document laments, mentioning both public and private contracts.

The call for evidence will inform a strategy the Commission plans to publish alongside the digital infrastructure-focused Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA), currently set to land in the first quarter of 2026.

The new strategy will focus on “community upscaling, industrial deployment, market integration and commercial viability of open-source innovations”, per the consultation.

To achieve these aims, the EU’s executive wants to improve how open source projects are governed and address issues in the security of their supply chains, where vulnerabilities can have widespread consequences.

The strategy will also seek to ensure that the organisations behind open source projects are financially sustainable, such as by developing partnerships with the public sector.

It will also encourage the public sector to adopt open source software and contribute back to it.

All this will serve to make Europe more technologically sovereign, the Commission hopes, ideally by replacing some of the “most expensive or excessively data-extractive proprietary stacks on the EU market”.

The EU’s executive already made moves in a similar direction last year, re-christening its Next Generation Internet programme for financing open source projects as the Open Internet Stack. There as well, it’s pushing for projects to become more commercially orientated to present viable alternatives to proprietary US tech.

The consultation also name-drops the recently founded European Digital Infrastructure Consortium for Digital Commons – where France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have said they’ll work together on developing open source tech for their civil servants.

The industry-backed EuroStack initiative, which set up a non-profit advocacy foundation back in October, has also been calling for public support to be targeted at scaling up commercially viable European technologies.

Comments on the Commission’s consultation can be submitted until February 3.

(nl)